London Extracts (2019, Sanderson Hotel, London, UK) various rock types, concrete, wood, soil, clay, and perspex. 4 columns 0.1m (diameter) x 2.5m (height)
Cored directly from the earth’s surface with an industrial drill these extractions were sampled from various locations around London. Composed of stratifications of earth, soil, sedimented layers of building materials or geological substrates. The samples of the urban environment were stacked on end. Recognisable as the kind of samples taken by land surveyors or archaeologists in preparation for site exploration, their status is somewhere between the scientific sample of the engineer and the architectural column of some imaginary or as yet unknown order of architecture. Like columns, they stand upright and define the physical space of habitation. Unlike architecture, these totemic columns support no ornamentation, pediment or superstructure. These cores simply are present, like the earth or buildings, in ways that make one aware of the materiality of our physical being and aware of the absences in the ground elsewhere, that now correspond to the presence of the cores here. That matrixial network is, like the earth from which the cores are extracted, the default setting for each newly generated boundary and edge that defines a new being, object and self. Exhibited in Dazzling Encounters at the Sanderson Hotel in London in 2019.