structural grotto (exchange)

structural grotto (exchange)	2024	Installation with sound	inimitables
		Artwork, image and photography © Perdita Phillips	environment
3 x 6 x 6 m	POA
Recycled wood and pallets, ply, cardboard, two sound tracks		POA
Project: UnderFOOT: Melange	2024
Exhibition: Mélange	2024	Mundaring Arts Centre

This work was built for the Melange exhibition. It creates in simple materials a 1:1 scale rock cavity and provides the setting for the not-so-round table events held during the exhibition. Halfway between the natural and the artificial, historic grottos were often places of quiet reflection, and were intrinsically linked with life and it’s reversal. Geometrically simplified, this installation nonetheless endeavours to express the spirit of stone so often prevalent in Western Australian landscapes. Here the geological underlies what we experience: it is ever-present, if only we would listen/heed. In his book Stone: an ecology of the inhuman, Jeffrey J Cohen rightly points out the difficulties of the lithic: the perceived indifference of stone to human endeavour—in its long time scales and slow processes—but also asks us to re-interpret of the inscrutability of the lithic: it is one of the impossible demands of stone, to not know—to hold onto this indeterminacy and the depths of geological time. As a meeting place between the deeps and earth’s surface, this installation encourages both internal and external conversations. You are welcome to sit quietly at the tables and think back on times and places where the geological world affected you—absorbing what you will of a rocky life.