I can't tell you how excited I am, within two weeks of creating my first piece of work Portal - To a Land Before Prometheus, it is going to London as part of the Thames Festival - Totally Thames and being exhibited alongside the Hands on History mudlarking exhibition at National Maritime Museum 10 -11 September. This is a great opportunity to come and see personal collections of historical finds from along the Thames foreshore and to see the impact humans have made on the appearance of the riverbed.

​Portal – To a Land Before Prometheus
Billie Bond
200 x 100 cm approx.
Ancestral Thames deposits – rocks and fossils, London Thames detritus – fired earth, coal, man-made objects, bones
2022
 
From the pristine deposits of deep time to the regressive human detritus of progress, the river Thames is a powerful life-giving, and taking force of nature. Portal – To a Land Before Prometheus transports us on a journey of over a million years of rolling rocks and hauling humans, eroding and building, depositing and flushing the history of the Earth.
 
The fluvial erosion of the past, is presented as two simple Earth shaped circles. Each one representing its time in history through contrasting colours, evoking frost and fire, and materials of nature and the man-made.
This work aims to encourage the viewer to consider a time before humans, a time before capitalist detritus.
 
Bond has created this work in response to a rapidly changing environment in the so-called Anthropocene. A residency at a working gravel quarry in Essex where she lives, has inspired her investigations: ‘I am interested in the role the Thames has played on shaping the landscape and developing society - the interrelationship between science and politics. The work interrogates ideas of geological rock migration paralleled with geographical human migration with the aim of questioning the impact we have had on our finely balanced Earth.’
 
The quarry in Essex extracts gravels and sands deposited by the ancestral Thames that once flowed here. During the last ice age, nearly half a million years ago, the Anglian glacier blocked the route of the old Thames and redirected it to where it flows today.
 

Had a great creative day with the kids at Great Waltham primary school (with the help of Norah) They remembered my last visit and the art activities we did with flint. They also remembered me talking about the ice age, ancestral Thames and how all the stones in their gardens got there. This time we were outside getting muddy, yes! They made 'ice age' mud hand prints, Andy Goldsworthy inspired pebble circles, stone stacks and best of all, the dig. With little safety gloves and trowels (kindly supplied by Hanson Aggregates) they dug their little patch in the corner of the playing field in search of hidden treasure. Even a pebble became a source of huge delight. They washed all their finds and placed them on the table in groups of genre - stones, fossils, natural objects and manmade objects. The finds created much discussion and enlightened the children on what interesting things lie right under their feet if they just spend a little time looking for it. 

The last few visits to the quarry, I have been collecting mud - chalky boulder clay deposited during the last ice age about 450,000 years ago, from the top surface. I then acquired some freshly dug London clay  from beneath the gravels and sands.
The London Clay Formation is a marine geological formation of the Ypresian age (56 - 49 million years ago) which crops out in the Southeast of England. It is well know for its fossil content. The fossils from the lower Eocene rocks indicate a moderately warm climate. Though sea levels changes during the deposition of the clay, the habitat was generally a lush forrest. (Wikipedia)

I am now the proud owner of a Thames Foreshore Permit from the Port of London Authority (PLA) this means I can now legally go mud larking along the Thames foreshore. Access to the detritus from years of human occupation along the river Thames has given me a fantastic contrast to the natural untainted deposits of the ancestral Thames. From its colour to its contents, each one reveals its hidden stories from the past which in-turn could inform the future, and of course inform the work I create - so exciting.
Below this simple display of Earth shaped circles shows just how different they are. 

PORTAL - To a Land Before Prometheus 
Ancestral Thames fluvial deposits - flint, quartzite, quartz, 
Thames detritus deposits - brick and tile fragments, coal, manmade metal objects, pottery and glass fragments, animal bones and teeth, plastic, 

What treasures await for me now?

There is so much to learn about this place, how it became and what will it become. Some describe the Essex landscape as a multi-layered cake, I see this landscape in a living anatomical way. When I take my dogs for their daily jaunt around the fields and ex-gravel pits near the village, I take in the landscape, the gentle rolling hills (if you can call them hills), the sound of the wind blowing through the wheat fields and the skylark's birdsong. It sounds nearly idillic, but then I look at the landscape again in a different light, as violated - a disguised mutilation. There are no natural meadows here filled with colourful splashes of wild flowers and the buzzing of honey bees, just acres of farmed land to feed the masses. I see this land peeled of its protective layer of skin, not just an abrasion but a dissection, a scalping. An alopecia like loss of hedges and woodland replaced by a wig of conformed, genetically modified matting. Perhaps this way of thinking relates back to my time as a nurse and strengthened with my recent return to hospital work as a part-time theatre healthcare assistant in the burns and plastics unit at the local hospital. Observing invasive life-saving surgical procedures is very much like the way I see how we operate on the landscape. This is progress, but progress always has its side effects.

The geological history of this site and the identification of the fluvial rocks, would be very difficult without the help I am getting from local retired geologists Ros and Ian Mercer. Their knowledge and passion for the landscape is immense. They have just published to the most incredible book about the geology of Essex Essex Rock  by Pelagic Publishing and available in most bookshops, it is extensively illustrated and written so we can all understand it. They also run Essex Rock and Mineral Society, which I have become a member of, I have learnt so much from the talks by visiting specialists, and the organised field trips. 

Next week I shall be returning to the local primary school to do a 'dig' with the children. The idea is for them to connect with the riches of the earth, to discover and learn about the objects found and how they can be used to make art. I shall share their creations with you next time along with my quarry anatomical anomalies. 

Driving the truck across the bed of the ancestral Thames in Essex is like being in a different world in a different time. I feel nearly neolithic apart from my hard hat, florescent PPE gear and encapsulated in a metal box with four knobbly rubber tires. I have a grin on my face from ear to ear. I made this happen and I am loving every minute of it.
I failed yet again in my plight for Arts Council funding to help me with this project but I am going to continue self-funded (and with kind support from Hanson Aggregates) drawing from the riches that the Ice Age has left behind, to inspire art that will reveal deep-time hidden stories of geological rock and geographical human migration - the journey has begun.

During Covid-19 lockdown my sculpture classes abruptly stopped but this gave me the opportunity to apply for public art commissions, something I had never done before as I was unable to commit the time to. I was shortlisted for the Emily Williamson Statue Campaign (founder of the RSPB) and The Channels Estate public art project. Unfortunately, I didn't get either commission. This is one of the painful and regular realities of being an artist, a bit like an actor, so near yet so far. 
The Channels Estate art project was to create a public sculpture, through community consultation, based around the theme of geology and the Ice Age. The houses there have been built on the grounds of a former gravel pit which extracted gravels and sands for the building trade. The site, in Essex is situated in the London Basin and the path of the Ancestral Thames where clay, sand, gravel and rocks were deposited. During the last ice age, the Anglian glacier blocked the route of the Ancestral Thames redirecting it to were it flows today (did you know that?) 
My research for this particular project took me to the site and to the collection of rare boulders in the grounds of Channels Restaurant. These boulders were excavated from the old gravel quarry and kept by the owners who are still there today. These huge rocks are known as Hertfordshire Puddingstone, they look like lumps of concrete but are actually naturally occurring conglomerates. Historically Puddingstone has been used as building material (as seen in our village church), in Roman querns to grind corn and as a protective charm against witchcraft.  This rich history makes for a fascinating art project and is not commonly known. ​

The site is a former Royal Airforce station. Opened in 1944, it was used by the United States Army Air Forces. During the war it was used primarily as bomber and a troop transport airfield for paratroopers. After the war it was closed in late 1945. With the facility released from military control, in 1946, the West Essex Car Club developed the 4.76 kilometre perimeter track for motor racing. Boreham Circuit hosted competitive races between 1949 and 1952. Among the drivers who raced there was Stirling Moss. In 1955 the Ford Motor Company bought the airfield to use as a test facility for trucks. In the late 1970s Boreham Proving Ground was the test site for Ford Heavy Truck Development. In July 1990, the Essex Police Air Support Unit began operating their Aérospatiale Twin Squirrel from the airfield, and in 1992 a hangar to house this helicopter was constructed beside the control tower, both buildings of which still remain at the moment. During the 1990s the airfield began to be dismantled for aggregate. Essex & Herts Air Ambulance was based here from its launch in 1998, when it only served Essex, until 2011. In 2008 Hertfordshire was added to the service. Essex Police operated a police helicopter from here between 1989 - 2012 when it was taken over by the National Police Air Service who continued to operate until 31 August 2018.
​(reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Boreham )
Hanson Aggregates now occupy the site and kindly supporting me in my quest to share the past and connect with the present through the visual language of sculpture.

My next post will be sharing with you the rich source of materials, including Hertfordshire puddingstone, I have at my disposal to get creative with. Hope you will follow me in my quarry journey.