Wild Stone

The production of an artists' book with guest artists Sticky Fingers Publishing and Lesley Sharpe and a commissioned essay by Sophie J Williamson (available to download in attachments). The book launched Van Gogh House in London, and copies were archived in the Tate archives, @thepoorhousereadingrooms and sold in The Freud Museum. Room and Book were resident at @theporhousereadingrooms with an online exhibition of books curated in response to Wild Stone.

Paul Nash’s spiral bound guide to Dorset is extraordinary. It was published by the great oil giant ‘shell oil’ as one of a series of guidebooks for motorists on British counties. Nash produced a guide which he filled with stirring images, poetic speculations on deep time and sets out the vision of landscape as a surrealist object. It contains different substrates and colours of paper, full bleed images of fossil and aquatic formations as well as guide notes. Though Nash is known for his investment in spirituality, and phenomenology we also refer to the book to explore Nash’s prescient post human vision for surrealism and ideas of the ontological real informed by science. We consider the conversations about time, geology and place held with Eileen Agar, her terms ‘Wild Flow’ and ‘Womb Magic’ in relation to embodied relationships with the geologic, and the international, decolonial and political reach of surrealism.

Though Nash is known for his investment in spirituality, and phenomenology we will also refer to the book to explore Nash’s prescient post human vision for surrealism and ideas of the ontological real informed by science. We will consider the conversations about time, geology and place held with Eileen Agar and her terms ‘Wild Flow’ and ‘Womb Magic’ in relation to embodied relationships with the geologic, and the International and political reach of surrealism. Wild Stone included a visit to the tate archives to explore the collection of international surrealism and handle love letters between Paul Nash and Eileen Agar, and visit house Museums in London that both act as archive and venue for contemporary art.

Each artist will use the book as a provocation and motif to make artworks for a spiral bound publication of artworks - exploring the cityscape and rural landscape as a surrealist object - of wild stone - replete with the forces of physics, geology, and deep time as well as human cultural action. It also opens up the paradox that a book that is so sensitive to the geological was commissioned by an oil multinational with its legacy and present of geological and ecological extraction. The book will be placed in the poorhouse reading room archive, The Tate archive and have a launch event at Van Gogh House.

https://vangoghhouse.co.uk/whats-on/wild-stone/

https://www.roomandbook.co.uk/room-book-in-residence-at-the-poorhouse-reading-rooms