Stones in our Pockets
I was notorious, as a child, for carrying stones in my pockets. The Scottish island where I grew up is marked with places rich in treasures: speckled pink granite, flinty shards of slate flecked with iron pyrite, basalt smoothed by near-freezing water to fit perfectly into the cupped palm of a hand. Alice Bonifant’s (2012), on display in at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, taps into the universality of this childhood compulsion. A rock, collected from the Makara coast and cast in bronze, is presented on a dark wooden plinth. Concentric fissures in the wooden surface of the plinth mark a tree’s annual growth rings: organic growth and human intervention combined in one object. On the wall behind this plinth a grid of 63 images depicts moments of ceremonial touching as disembodied hands trace a range of sculptural monuments. In these photographs the effect of cumulative touch is apparent in localised areas of polished brightness—Greyfriar Bobby’s nose, Juliet Capulet’s right breast. Like them, Bonifant’s monument shows evidence of human touch, the ridge closest to the viewer glistening bronze Jointly curated by Susan Ballard and Sophie Thorn, brings natural histories into conversation with human histories, using art as the conduit through which to consider their entangled nature. Throughout the exhibition Ballard and Thorn present us with a range of frameworks for reconsidering our relationship with the world in which we exist. Such frameworks are made literal through a selection of reading matter displayed on a small table. Ranging from indigenous knowledge and poetry to early twentieth-century geology and contemporary arts writing, these books use language to encode culturally situated systems of knowledge. Despite the presence of this library, this intelligently researched exhibition wears its theoretical underpinnings lightly, eschewing didacticism for a more speculative approach. There are no explicit demands made upon the viewer here. In their place Ballard and Thorn have drawn together a range of artworks which offer the viewer experiential and material ways into the terrain between human and non-human.
