January 2025

31 January - 7 February 2025
Living Stones
Porthmeor Studios, St Ives

This gathering of artworks by four contemporary artists based in Cornwall explores animisms of rock and other lively geophysical matterings. The works have emerged from the artists’ travels and ‘field research’ involving walking, climbing, and on-site experimentation with materials in different environments. They manifest creative encounters with shimmering serpentine rockpools on the Lizard peninsula or intimacies with soaring crags and cliff faces of Welsh mountains. They are attuned to secret whispers of Cornish standing stones and industrial ruins or the resonances of ancient archaeology on the island of Orkney in Scotland. They have moved with flows and geological metamorphoses of plastic waste from Cornish beaches to the volcanic island of Gapado in South Korea. Although the environmental references and artists’ aesthetics vary, these works transmit the vibrant life of geophysical matter through processes that trouble taxonomies. The multivalent works disturb the borders and markers that separate categories of life and non-life; human and non-human; deep pasts, turbulent presents, and speculative futures. In this way, they answer recent calls from eco-critical thinkers for artists and animists to help us reorientate perception for urgent unlearning in our era of environmental predicament.