off to the National maritime museum

 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.