Robert Macfarlane questions Abigail Reynolds

on ShapeShift; landscape in motion

RM You’ve described the work to me as ‘a huge

extinction wave’. Can you tell me more about

this image?

AR The work is in itself a sort of massive energy wave.

A huge amount of energy goes into the fabrication

– it’s strong but rough. To build it a team of

people worked flat out for thirteen days. The

reverberations of this energy linger in the work.

When I was thinking about this sculpture I

remembered those banks of slides in amusement

parks – each slide is a different colour but they

form a solid wave. You can’t slide down the

ShapeShift sculpture but it has this sense of

kinetic energy. I am a bad surfer, so I frequently

get a real pasting in the shore-break of the sea.

A couple of times I really have felt that I might

drown, and this has given me a very physical

sense of the terrifying energy of waves. The

physical impact and energy of the sculpture is

essential to its meaning.

There are many waves across the length of the

sculpture, with one huge waterfall-like drop.

These literally map sea-level changes and the

effect of this on biodiversity. I think of each

one as a struggle by living things to evolve and

proliferate in constantly changing conditions.

Each rise is a surge of energy and optimism

that’s then pushed down again. I suppose this

extinction curve – as the waves drop – is more

poignant for me than successful generation.

RM Why have you used recycled materials to create

the strata of the piece?

AR It would have been much faster to use new material

to build the sculpture, because then you can just

call a supplier and get precisely what you want.

This not only saves a lot of labour in collecting and

processing, it also means that you don’t have to be

as creative. Mending and making-do is a genuinely

creative activity, and used to be our pervasive

attitude to objects. Contemporary economic

conditions such as globalisation, oil abundance and

cheap labour means we’ve superseded this attitude

in the UK. Everyone just buys a new thing and

chucks the old thing into landfill. To work exclusively

with recycled materials is an environmental decision

and a social comment – because we are creating

whole landscapes of landfill across the globe I

am reluctant to add more to the pile. When the

exhibition closes, the sculpture will be dismantled

and all the materials will return to the centre they

came from for recycling.

Sculpturally, using recycled materials means that

everything already has an embedded time and

narrative – they are complex materials – they’ve

been somewhere. We have processed everything

into small bits, which removes them from what

they were, but previous use tends to linger. The

sculpture contains bed-heads, chairs, kitchen

cabinets, coffee tables, even parts of old fencing

from Durlston Country Park. One section we are

using as a support still has a notice on it from its

previous life as a gate. It reads ‘Leave the flowers

for others to enjoy’.

RM Is scale as significant as shape in this work?

AR The scale I’ve chosen is aggressively room-filling

to achieve that crucial sense that it overwhelms

any individual in the room with it. The work

exactly fits the reception room of Durlston

castle, and you can view it from many different

angles; you can walk over it in one place, under

it in another, you can view it from the height

of a platform or at floor level. The sculpture is

like a huge body – like Gulliver in Lilliput or a

dinosaur skeleton in the Natural History museum;

something unfamiliar that you want to get a

sense of from all directions.

There is another scale to ShapeShift, in the

small porcelain shapes piled up in the space.

These are based on the shapes of radiolarians

– a microscopic plankton which inhabited

the Jurassic and Cretaceous seas off the

Dorset coast, and still do. These are orders of

magnitude larger than actual radiolaria, so at

first they look like little piles of bones. Oddly,

they aren’t found in the rocks of the Dorset

Coast, though they must have been there and

have not been preserved for some reason. These

‘missing radiolarian’ are an interesting paradox.

Sculpturally, they act as a disruptor, as they are

not part of the graph. The shapes have been

handmade, each by a different person, so they

extend the sense of community in the work.

RM Has working on this piece sharpened or

threatened your sense of yourself?

AR That’s also linked to the scale of the sculpture:

at this scale the work stops being personal.

It’s not one person’s making, it’s the work of

many hands. That’s important to me. As well

as the team that built the sculpture, the work

is also a collaboration with two scientists and

also involved a group of local people who love

this coast line. The sculpture is a vision of a

collective situation rather than my interior world.

Culturally, we are encouraged to be self-obsessed

individuals, which I find increasingly tedious,

even in art works where you sort of expect it.

I am more interested in placing the individual

in the wider picture.

RM One of the effects of deep time, in my

experience, is to abolish ethics. Seen in the

context of the Cretaceous, present-day human

actions become negligible. You understand that

homo sapiens will pass, given time, of which

there is an abundance. Do you recognise this

effect? Does it concern you?

AR It’s rather calming to have your individual person

negated in the way you describe.

RM Is this sculpture as warning, or sculpture as elegy?

AR Hmm… can it be both? Ideally it would be both.

RM You are fascinated by layers and layerings,

for example, in your earlier work Mount Fear.

From where does this interest come?

AR We’re always looking at the top surfaces of

materials and in fact the edges of them are

often more curious because they are less familiar,

so I sometimes like to build only out of edges.

In common with ShapeShift, Mount Fear tries

to suggest an accretion of events over time, and

the only way to visualise that sculpturally is by

layering. Mount Fear is an accretion of violent

human interactions. Similarly, the whole premise

of ShapeShift is that tiny increments (numbers of

microfossils, gradual changes in temperature etc)

have massive effects when they are added up.

When you make an object by layering each layer

makes only a small difference, but when that action

is repeated and repeated over time you achieve a

massive effect. In this way the making itself mimics

the source, as well as the final surface.

If you were to look at almost any rock, as you

walk along the beach below the castle from

Peveril Point, you would see that it is comprised

of countless fossilised bodies – usually of snails,

oysters and mussels. The surface is beautifully

complex and layered. This is another reference

for the sculpture.

RM Finally, what’s an ostracod? And – do you think it

could beat a pterapod in a fair fight?

AR The team that are building the sculpture now

call any off-cut of wood ‘an ostracod’, as

that’s what we are using for the ostracod line.

Fossilised ostracods can just about be seen

with the naked eye in the rocks on the beach

below the castle – they look like minute baked-

beans in sauce. They aren’t extinct. They are

still in today’s oceans. And since the notable

fact about ostracods is that the penis takes up

a third of it’s body area, I wouldn’t fancy an

ostracod’s chances in any sort of fight, let alone

with something pronounced ‘terror-pod’.

Abigail Reynolds questions

Robert Macfarlane on landscape

AR In your book, Mountains of the Mind, you talk

about our imaginary relationship to landscape,

can you tell me more about this concept?

RM Our responses to landscape are for the most

part culturally devised. That is to say, when

we look at a landscape, we do not see what

is there, but largely what we think is there.

We attribute qualities to a landscape which

it does not intrinsically possess – savageness,

for example, or bleakness, or homeliness

– and we value it accordingly. We ‘read’

landscapes, in other words, we interpret their

forms in the light of our own experience

and memory, and that of our shared cultural

memory. The anthropologist Franz Boa spoke

of ‘kulturbrille’: culture-spectacles, the lenses

through which, to more or less witting degrees,

we see the forms of the world. It’s important

to remember, however, that there are aspects

to any landscape that are non-negotiable,

uninflected by culture. If you fall from a sea-

cliff, imagination will not give you wings;

if we are trapped in a cave by a rising tide,

there’s no way of dreaming yourself free.

AR How important for you is the experiential or

physical sense of landscape?

RM Essential, politically and aesthetically speaking.

So many forces now warp us away from direct

experience of the land on which we live.

Urbanisation, habits of travel, modern farming

practices, footloose industries, the internet…

more and more people are being prised from

a relationship with the physical aspects of

this archipelago – its scores of rock-types, its

capricious weathers, its tides, seasons, birds,

plants and creatures, its hundreds of rivers,

its thousands of peaks. We experience, as no

historical period has before, disembodiment

and dematerialisation. The almost infinite

connectivity of the technological world, for all

the benefits that it has brought, has exacted

a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many

ways forgotten what the world feels like. And

as we have done so, many new maladies of the

soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are

complicated products of the distance we have

set between ourselves and the world. We have

come increasingly to forget that our minds are

shaped by the bodily experience of being in the

world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and

habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit

and ideologies we absorb. A constant and

formidably defining exchange occurs between

the physical forms of the world around us, and

the cast of our inner world of imagination.

The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the

smell of distant rain carried as a scent-stream

in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on

one’s outstretched palm, or the feel of a fossil

beneath one’s fingertips: such encounters shape

our beings and our imaginations in ways which

are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.

AR How do you see our contemporary relationship

to landscape in relation to the past? Has there

been a cultural shift in our attitude?

RM Generalisations on this topic are difficult and

dangerous. But one significant and relevant

change would be the arrival, in the early

nineteenth century, of the idea of ‘deep time’

with regard to landscape. Geology, in the early

1800s, battled and (to some degree) overcame the

creationist ‘young-earth’ orthodoxy, which held

that the earth had been created in seven days,

only a few millennia ago. Geology, impertinently,

ratcheted back the age of the earth by billennia.

Suddenly, it was possible to view landscape

surfaces, and landscape cross-sections (such as

one gets on sea-cliffs) in terms of vertiginously

ancient time-schemes: this inch-wide stratum was

laid down 250 millennia ago, that inch of chalk

represents the compressed bodies of uncountable

invertebrates, settling down into a limy silt over

the course of thousands of years.

AR Do you think Immanuel Kant’s ideas of the

Romantic sublime and the Mathematical

sublime are still relevant?

RM Unmistakably. HD Thoreau spoke of wildness as a

power which allows us ‘to witness our own limits

transgressed’. Sublime sights – those natural

forces or presences that are too big, too fast,

too vigorous, too ancient for us to comprehend

– are chastening. They remind us that we operate

within a world that exceeds us in multiple ways.

Deep time is a sublime energy, or dimension, or

force, or whatever we would call it. Though I’m

also interested in wonder, as potentially a less

crude, more constructive response to landscape,

in that it does not overwhelm, but prompts

desire to save, help and cherish.

Biography

Abigail Reynolds lives and works in London and

Cornwall. She is a graduate of Goldsmiths College

London (Fine Art MA) and Oxford University (English

Literature BA). She exhibits her work internationally,

and notable shows include New Contemporaries 2003,

After the Fact Tullie House Carlisle 2005,

Offside at The Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin 2006,

Behemoth at Danielle Arnaud London 2007, and

Neveroddoreven at the Serpentine Gallery London 2007.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of

the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), and,

forthcoming in September 2007, The Wild Places,

which describes his journeys in search of the remaining

wild places of Britain and Ireland. He is a Fellow of

Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

This artwork takes the geology of the Jurassic coast – 185 million years

of the earth’s history – as it’s starting point. To create this sculpture,

visual artist Abigail Reynolds worked with two scientists; Samantha

Gibbs, a micropalentologist from the National Oceanography Centre,

Southampton, and mathematician Bjorn Stanstede from the University

of Surrey. Together with a small group from the local community they

analysed the landscape around Durlston Country Park.

The title of the artwork, ShapeShift; landscape in motion, reflects the

premise of the project that the landscape is essentially fragile and unstable,

shaped by a range of environmental factors changing over the millennia,

and that it is now shifting more rapidly. Our traditional sense of the

landscape being more powerful than human influence has undergone a

reversal with the widespread acceptance of anthropogenic climate change.

The focus of our enquiry are the microfossils left by marine and freshwater

plankton species and microscopic sea-floor species; markers of huge

climate changes, which comprise the limestones and shales along the

local coastline. Over millions of years we can track how different species

have responded to the changing climate as they come into being, evolve

and become extinct. Their microfossils are part of the macro-shape of the

coastline, and are amongst the factors that determine which rocks are hard

and will resist erosion, which will collapse into bays and valleys.

The consideration of shapes on different scales as meaningful markers in

the landscape is key to the work. This large-scale sculpture is built from

locally sourced recycled materials, much of it from the castle itself which

is currently undergoing refurbishment. This decision puts the changing

relationship between homosapiens and the natural environment at

centre-stage, asking us all to reflect on the impact we make on the

environment, now and in the future.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ShapeShift; landscape in motion

12 July – 29 August 2007

Durlston Castle

Durlston Country Park

Lighthouse Road

Swanage

Dorset BH19 2JL

The project has been supported by

Dorset County Council

Arts Council England (South West)

Dorset AONB Sustainable Development Fund

Fine Family Foundation

The Jurassic Coast Trust

www.durlston.co.uk

http://durlstonshapeshift.blogspot.com

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kirsty Edgar and Clara Bolton of the

National Oceanography Centre, Southampton,

and Dr Paul Bown of University College London.

Thanks to Martin Cooke project co-ordinator,

Cleo Evans county visual arts development

officer and all those who have assisted on the

project, including staff at Durlston Country Park,

in particular senior ranger Robin Plowman.

Also, Anjana Khatwa, Sibyl Fine King, Malcolm

Turnbull, Bergit Arends of the Natural History

Museum, Purbeck School, Lisa Binns education

co-ordinator, Sue Dampney, and Kirstie Snow.

Abigail Reynolds was assisted by Alistair

Cartwright, Tom Hardiman, Andy Harper,

Helen Marten and Islamiya Scarr in the

creation of this sculpture.

Thanks to the local group; Lisa Binns,

Richard Smith, Davina Smith, Phil Anslow

and Marnie Shaw.

Interview with Dr Samantha Gibbs

What is ShapeShift?

The dimensions of the ShapeShift sculpture as it

spreads across the room are based on a record of

diversity along the Devon, Dorset and Isle of Wight

(IOW) coasts. This record has been collated using rock

samples stretching from the Triassic rocks at Lyme Regis

which are approximately 200 million years old through

to Paleogene rocks from White Cliff Bay (IOW) that

are 35 million years old. Diversity, or the number of

different species that were in existence at any given

time, dictates the width of the sculpture, and time runs

the length of the room with the oldest records to the

left as you enter through the front door.

The rock samples were collected in 1987 by a team

of UK micropaleontologists (scientists who study the

skeletal remains of past microscopic life) who made

a count of how many species of each of the major

microfossil groups were present in each sample*. The

surface of the sculpture is comprised of six materials

because six of these microfossil groups were found

along the coast. These are marine and freshwater

plankton species (calcareous nannoplankton,

foraminifera, dinoflagellates, freshwater algae) and

microscopic sea-floor species (shrimp-like creatures

called ostracods, sea-floor dwelling foraminifera).

The number of species in each of these microfossil

groups is represented by the width of each of the

horizontal bands of material that flow down the

length of the room. The combined width of these

bands – the overall width of the sculpture at any given

point – shows the total local diversity, i.e. the number

of species that lived in this area of the south coast at

each time interval. This local diversity is controlled by

a number of different factors, mainly environmental

conditions but also preservation and how many

species existed overall, i.e. global diversity.

What determines the height of the sculpture?

The height of the sculpture represents local

water depth. Water depth was the main factor

controlling local diversity during our study interval,

but temperature was also important, with diversity

generally increasing with increasing temperature. Local

water depth is controlled by a combination of global

sea-level effects, such as melting of ice-caps resulting

in sea-level rise, plus local controls such as how quickly

the seafloor and adjacent land is subsiding and how

much sediment is being added to the seafloor.

The height of the sculpture above the floor shows

how deep the water was at any given time – the

higher the sculpture the deeper the water. As you can

see, water depth along the south coast has varied

dramatically through geological time from deep shelf

seas of upwards of 50 metres depth, to rivers only a

few metres deep. The highest point – where you can

pass under the sculpture – is at Ballard Down. The

water depth here was around 150 metres 80 to 90

million years ago (referred to as Ma). The lowest point

along the sculpture – where you can walk across it – is

at Peveril Point and through to Swanage Bay, at about

125 to 145 Ma.

As a rule of thumb, microfossil diversity is lowest

where water depths are very shallow, such as lagoons,

rivers, estuaries etc, as these environments tend to

be relatively unstable with more variability in salinity,

muddiness, and food availability. Therefore, though

the relatively few species that find these conditions

favourable may exist in high numbers, the overall

diversity is low. Furthermore, diversity may also be

reduced because preservation of these organisms tends

to be poor in sandy, oxidized shallow waters or land

(terrestrial) conditions and therefore fewer organisms

are preserved. Conversely, local diversity is highest in

the warm shelf seas where marine conditions are more

stable and preservation is good.

What causes the changes mapped by the sculpture?

In general, the rocks of the Devon and Dorset coast

are younger from west to east. Therefore, as you walk

along the coast you are travelling through time and

through a pattern of diversity changes. For example,

walking east from Kimmeridge Bay we walk through a

sequence of environments that represent a fall in water

depth. By the time we are at Durlston Bay, waters

are so shallow that we are standing on a mixture of

terrestrial and lagoonal sediments. These have much

lower microfossil diversities than the deep water

Kimmeridge sediments. Continuing east through the

lower Cretaceous, very low microfossil diversities are

associated with the lake and river environments of the

Wealden Beds of Swanage Bay. Sea-level then began to

rise quickly and diversity with it. As we walk up to the

topographic high of the chalk at Ballard Down we are

also walking up to a peak in diversity and water depth.

Local and global microfossil diversity reached its all-time

high in these warm chalk seas of the upper Cretaceous

that covered much of Europe – not just because

species flourished in the stable marine conditions but

also because of the overriding evolutionary trend in

global diversities. This was prior to the massive collapse

in diversity associated with the extinctions of the

Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary at up to 65 Ma. At this

time up to 75% of fossil marine species, as well as a

large number of land plants and animals, disappeared

across a relatively short interval of time, with current

theories for the cause of these extinctions including

meteorite impact, sea-level fall and volcanic activity.

Why is there a gap in the sculpture?

Between approximately 80 and 55 Ma we have a 25

million year gap in our record, which includes the time

interval where the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary should

be. These rocks are missing because there were large

sea-level changes at this time that caused both a lack

of sediments being laid down and also erosion and

removal of part of the sedimentary record. Therefore,

the chalk of Ballard Down abuts much younger rocks of

the Eocene to the east in Studland Bay and we do not

see the youngest Cretaceous or Paleocene rocks.

Is ShapeShift an accurate biodiversity picture?

We need to remember that this record only shows the

diversity of microscopic organisms that fossilise. This

means we are not recording real, total diversity, as we

are not representing the diversity of larger organisms.

Furthermore, many, perhaps most, animals and plants

never produce fossils because, for example, they do not

have hard skeletons or they live in an environment that

does not allow for good preservation. Fossil diversity

estimates will therefore always be lower than real

diversity. Though we are unable to truly quantify total

diversity, patterns of change in microfossil diversity

would in general mimic the overriding patterns we

would see if we were able to look at total diversity.

Despite these limitations, the diversity patterns

shown in the sculpture highlight the importance of

environmental change on local diversity, and the

superimposed influences of preservation and evolution

on the fossil record.

Why collaborate with an artist to present this

research as a sculpture?

As a scientist, I think it’s too easy to remain within

the confines of scientific language and within the

relatively small communication circles of academia.

We regularly present our research at national and

international meetings and publish in scientific journals,

but communication with the general public is rather

limited and often unimaginative. To be involved in

this project has meant a number of things to me both

professionally and personally.

Professionally, it allows me to address the societal

obligation we have as scientists to communicate to

the general public. This overlaps with the personal

aspects of this project: I get to spend lots of time out

of the office in a beautiful place and share with people

something of the amazing geological story of the rocks

under our feet. Also, with this unique integration of

geological data and art, I’m seeing geological data

in a whole new light. It’s difficult to visualise the

enormity of geological time and the huge biological

and environmental changes that have occurred, but the

sheer scale of ShapeShift brings that into sharp focus.

Finally, my involvement in this project has also allowed

me to communicate something of my deeply felt

concerns of how important our individual role is in

shaping the landscape around us. By improving our

understanding of what controls environment change,

from mountain-building and the closure of oceans on

timescales of millions of years to rapid climate change

like that occurring today, we have the opportunity to

think more clearly about what the future holds for us,

for the landscape around us, and for the ecosystems

with which we share that landscape.

* Mesozoic and Cenozoic Stratigraphical Micropalaeontology

of the Dorset coast and Isle of Wight, Southern England,

Editors A.R. Lord and P. R. Bown. Field guide for the 20th

European Micropalaeontological Colloquium, published

by the British Micropalaeontological Society, 1987.

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dinoflagellate cysts

D

calc.nannoplankton

C

planktic foraminifera

pF

ostracods

O

organic-walled algae

A

sea-floor foraminifera

sF

The ShapeShift sculpture is built using the graphs above. The lower blue graph shows estimates of local

water depth and is represented in the sculpture by height. The upper grey graph shows the diversities

of the six main microfossil groups which are represented by sections of different materials running the

length of the room. The key shows which microfossil group corresponds to each section on the graph,

and the black scale bar to the left of the grey plot shows the section width for 20 species.

The two plots are smoothed to five million years. This means that any peaks or troughs in water

depth or diversity that are shorter that five million years will not show up on the graph. The graph

is labeled to show the geographical locations that correspond to the rock samples. The distances

between the locations may seem odd because the distances are not in miles but in millions of years.

Microfossil images courtesy of the National Oceanography Centre

and www.ucl.ac.uk/GeolSci/micropal/index.html

Key

Fossils found in rock formations along the local coastline

Pond snails5mm

Ostracods2mm