485 million years ago sediments from unnamed volcanic eruptions slowly settled on the hillsides of unnamed mountains. Compressed over millions of years, these sediments combined, forming blueish gray stones, stones that now constitute slate, a defining feature of the landscape and culture of North Wales.
The inactive Dinorwic slate quarry and the peak of Yr Wyddfa, the highest peak in the UK lie only a few kilometers from each other. Both exist today as important sites of tourist attraction, yet they carry distinctive visual archives and human marks that uniquely historicize each space in the present.
‘I Stood at the Foot of a Mountain’ looks to the material histories of slate as a connection point to consider the temporal and spatial realities that exist within both locations. Reconstitutions through time of the slate into culturally mediated forms, operational devices, and a post industrial landscape mark and break the stones slow lifecycle. Noticing the collision of temporalities held within the materiality of this space, allows us to step out of one temporality into another, to reflect on the projected image of one on another. Through a re-mediation of space, visually and sonically, the geological becomes an inflection point to consider how an anthropocentric vision of the past is re-inscribed on the present.
