Ammonites atthe Museum
NICK PELLING
There are certain subjects that baffle the human mind. For example, I do not know what a proton or a quark is. And I know this is embarrassing, but I don’t even understand Euclid’s parallel postulate. And even more embarrassing than that, I don’t really know what an algorithm is, even though they are apparently the invisible digi-creatures that rule our current world.
The First Flower, print by Emily Johns
But one of the most mind-defying subjects is surely what they call geological time periodisation. As we all roughly know, a few hundred years ago men with beards decided that the very, very, very long ago could be neatly divided up into named segments. But, even if we take just one of those segments, say the Cretaceous period, it is bamboozling, mainly because this time segment was, apparently, seventy-seven million years in duration. I don’t know about you, but I find that my brain itself becomes a block of impermeable rock when confronted with such a notion. So, possibly we need a more sensitive way to think into that vast abyss of time gone by. Maybe artists can help.
THE JURASSIC MIND
The SoCo artists group currently have an exhibition at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery entitled Stories From Deep Time, which seeks to use the rich fossil record of our area–much of which is part of the Museum’s display – as an inspiration for art. The result is an incredibly diverse exhibition, which doesn’t so much seek to unbaffle our minds, as just try to use imagination and creative mess to find another way into the Jurassic chambers of our sensual brains.
Doubtless all visitors to the show will have different favourites. At an amusingly almost literal level, I was very taken with Samantha Guertin’s paintings of female bathers at Pett Level, scampering about with skittish dinosaurs. As though dinosaurs had summer holidays. But there is so much else. Cheryl Bell offers an extraordinary and eccentric cabinet of curiosities, loosely themed around the work of the polymath Teilhard de Chardin.
ROCK RIFFING
Agness Clark produced two large pieces entitled Fossil Memories, which imply that our own experiences lie in our minds like fossilising regrets and passions. There is, it seems, an inexhaustible range of ways to riff from the notion of such irretrievable chasms of chrono-distance. Several artists seek to use coastline or leftover materials as some sort of conduit to the past. Fiona Denning, for example, thoughtfully explores wax and sand and unctuous paint as possible portholes. Emily Johns’ The First Flower takes a different route, smashing together an aggressive skeleton with notions of aboriginal petals and oil rigs: powerful stuff in raw black and white. There isn’t enough space here to do justice to all the artists on show; probably best to just go and see this wonderful, free exhibition for yourself.
Overall, the exhibition cannot be neatly summed up. It is perhaps as baffling as the geological riddles that so entranced seaside stumblers of the Enlightenment era. But that is, in a sense, the point–to creep up on this world of inexplicable strangeness from a myriad of angles all at the same time. Still, the heavy veil of the past will always, to some extent, leave us sketching in the dark.
The Exhibition is on at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery until April 27.
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