Dr Clair Chinnery

(personal gallery text, included in a section of the exhioition entitled 'Seeing Differrently')

Chinnery’s sculptures are carved on-site where the stone is quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Her process mirrors the environmental forces responsible for shaping giant pebbles at Church-Ope Cove, which originated as quarrying waste and have since been “tumbled by decades of storms and tides”. Hammering the stones with a ‘bouchard’ or bush hammer, Chinnery relies on her sense of touch to find geometric forms in her sculptures.

Exhibition of:

Remains II: Twenty Future Fossils, 2019, 3D prints in ABS, Perspex, vinyl, wood, 1250 x 620 x 620 mm (each pedestal x 20 – dimensions variable according to installation/exhibition context)

Exhibited as part of the Oxford Festival of Ideas (IF) 2019.

Venue: Bodleian Library, Weston Library, October, 2019.

N/A

(provided by gallery)

Chinnery’s sculptures, carved on-site in Portland, evoke environmental forces responsible for shaping the giant pebbles of Portland’s Church-Ope Cove, which originated as quarrying waste, tumbled by decades of storms and tides.

Her forms suggest the ‘equipment’ of maritime and quarrying industries, the origins of materials and processes that create limestone, fossilised and living marine micro-organisms, the stone of Empire and their interrelationships. Her sculptures are not only symbiotes of diverse reference points but also of a critically reflective relationship to the political act of direct carving at a specific geographic location. They also engage with the landscape, heritage and ecology of Portland including its contemporary industrial role in the global mineral extraction industries.

Carving is a lengthy and technical process, yet it is also an intuitive practice. With a ‘bouchard’ or bush hammer, Chinnery uses pulverisation just like prehistoric ancestors. This highly repetitive process creates a mindful space as stone is ‘pared back’. Each blow, releases a pungent, gaseous reminder of the fossil materiality of limestone, with its origins in life and death. Her sculptures defy orientation as she uses sunlight as a tool to see where surfaces need more work. The ‘rolling’ nature of the carving process, mimics the mineral rich tropical seas, which were prehistoric nurseries to the ‘oolitic’ particles that make up Portland limestone as well as the more recent wave motion responsible for ‘sculpting’ the pebbles at Church-Ope Cove. She endeavours, to find geometric form through a direct and embodied, multi-sensory ‘kinaesthetic’ approach, especially reliant on her sense of touch.

Since 2019 I have travelled to Portland to work in stone. My relationship with the island goes back to 1990 when, as a Fine Art student, I first visited the island, on a university field trip. At this time, (aged 19) I refused to try stone carving—thinking it too ‘traditional’—choosing instead to make assemblages from found materials and the smooth pebbles of Church-Ope Cove. 29 years later, I returned make up for this lost carving opportunity determined to engage more deeply with the landscape, heritage and ecology of Portland including its contemporary industrial role in the global mineral and extraction industries.

Significantly, my 21st century carving experiences consider my original encounter with the island and Portland stone through an auto-ethnographic lens. I utilise the experience of carving at the site of the stone’s origin, to make work influenced by the environmental forces that created the pebbles at Church-Ope Cove—which largely consist of quarrying waste, dumped into the sea, tumbled and washed up by many decades of storms and tides. I have noticed that my sculptures sit at a meeting point between direct and indirect referents, hinting at multiple possible identifiable forms. For example: I am interested in the ‘equipment’ of the maritime and quarrying industries, the origins of the materials and processes that formed the stone, fossilised and living marine micro-organisms and the varied relationships between these. In this way, my sculptures have become symbiotes of varied reference points and also of a critically reflective relationship to the act of carving at this location.

I would describe my process as unorthodox and far removed from the highly technically skilled practices of stonemasons. Carving is a lengthy and physical process. It involves focus, patience and commitment, and yet it is also possible to work intuitively. By extensively using a ‘bouchard’ or bush hammer, I use pulverisation (like prehistoric ancestors) as a primary carving method, regularly turning the stone using a technique akin to modelling in clay. This hugely repetitive process creates a mindful space where the stone becomes ‘pared back’. Each blow, releases a pungent gaseous smell, reminding me of the fossil materiality of limestone, with its origins in life. My sculptures start to take forms that have no particular orientation and I use sunlight as a tool to see where surfaces need more work. The ‘rolling’ nature of my carving process, mimics both the warm, mineral rich tropical seas, which were prehistoric nurseries to the oolitic particles that make up Portland limestone as well as the much more recent wave motion responsible for ‘sculpting’ the pebbles at Church-Ope Cove. I endeavour, to find geometric form through a multi-sensory ‘kinaesthetic’ approach which is especially reliant on my sense of touch. Additionally, the stones I split and select correspond to available carving time. In this regard, each sculpture, measures volume but also duration as its fourth dimension, evidencing further the critically conscious relationship between artist and material, and extended by the use of a smartwatch recording that a stone is struck approximately 40,000 times on each carving day.

(provided by gallery)

Remains I: Threads, Tangles and Fearsome Bodies (fragment)
2019

photographic prints on di-bond aluminium under acrylic glass, stainless steel, paper (edition 2 of 5)

Size: 200 x 200 x 18 mm (3 of 14)

This work considers the severing of physical connections between mother and daughter, and—like other works of mine—is informed by material residues left behind by human rites of passage (including birth, growth, reproduction and death). Remains I includes microscopic photographs of diseased neurons from my late mother’s donated brain tissue. It presents the most intimate of portraits, where I consider both her physical and cognitive ‘metamorphosis’ by imaging the pathology of her illness (Parkinson’s disease) at the cellular level. This is juxtaposed with a curious captioning system, which not only locates each image within her brain, but also recalls a series of ‘monstrous’ or ‘creaturely’ encounters from her lifetime, consisting of memories, observations, and hallucinations, brought about by her illness. In developing this work, I collaborated with researchers at the Parkinson’s Brain Bank at Imperial College London.