Wonderful Order

Fossils have been long studied as great curiosities, collected with great pains, treasured with great care and at great expense, and shown and admired with as much pleasure as a child’s rattle or a hobby-horse is shown and admired by himself and his playfellows, because it is pretty; and this has been done by thousands who have never paid the least regard to that wonderful order and regularity with which Nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum. –William Smith, 1796

An installation of video and drawings, commissioned by North Lincolnshire Museum in 2021, created in response to William Smith’s historic 1815 Geological Map. For Smith, this map was a practical way to reveal the interconnectivity of widely dispersed materials and processes that would otherwise lay beyond human apprehension. Smith is an exquisite example of a map admired for its science, as much as the beauty of its execution. My work responds to the map and to the museum’s own fossil collection. Inspired by how Smith’s map makes visible not just the ‘stuff’ beneath our feet but also geological or deep time, I sought to make visible the formation of drawing. The outcome is an installation of video and various drawings in light boxes. The light boxes reveal the inner textures of the paper and ink in abstract drawings that evoke the geological structures of Smith’s map and the intricate composition of fossils. The video combines slow-motion or time-lapse clips of the ink moving across the paper, with extreme close-up images of various maps and fossils from the museum’s collection. There is a particular emphasis on the Gryphaea fossils which are tightly linked to the very existence of Scunthorpe.