Summary of previous blogs from 25th October up to 5-12-2019

              It has also always been my intention to create a diptych, following up my previous project, Voicing the Wye, with Voicing the Soil. The unifying thread of both projects is to collect, collate and re-present the stories of people in Herefordshire in the Anthropocene. The project places the focus on soil, the main actor, to show the social and political forces that are at play in its formation.

The project is sited in Herefordshire as a whole: why didn’t I choose a narrower geographical area? 

I learn by talking to people and I needed the variety and scale that comes from covering the whole county. Herefordshire contains a great variety of soils. I also discovered the mutability of soil, how its nature and fertility can change, and the countryside with it. Hence, by extrapolation, the key question of how soil is created.  A smaller area would miss out a great deal. Finally, dealing with a smaller area would have been no less complex, because I would still have had to address all the issues raised by ‘the Anthropocene’.

Returning to the point about variety and scale, soil in the Anthropocene project was inevitably an accretion of micro and macro scales from soil biota to deep time.

Can information gathering be aesthetic? For example, I experimented with the possibilities of listening to the sounds of soil’s biota, based on my visiting A Sound Not Meant To Be Heard at the Oriel Davies Gallery (Anthony Shapland, 2018). I also experimented with the possibilities of using geology to explain the creation of soil as a historical element, resulting from deep time processes. William Smith’s Geological Section from London to Snowdon, Showing the Varieties of the Strata, and the Correct Altitudes of the Hills (1817), which runs through Herefordshire soil, queries our relationship to our origins as a species (Darwin) and simultaneously, as a continuum from birth to death, that of soil and the survival of species on the planet (the Anthropocene).

William Smith, Geological Section from London to Snowdon, Showing the Varieties of the Strata, and the Correct Altitudes of the Hills (1817). Oxford University Museum of Natural History

I could have represented Voicing the Soil by focusing on a local plant and its soil profile. Both this and the map above could provide the spectator with an X-ray vision of earth’s history and human influences. They both survey the terrain by using a direct relationship to soil, rather than current remote  sensors. However, Smith’s offers a geological cross-section left to right, a panorama which narrates his travels from ’the slate and granite mountains of Snowdonia, through the coal tracts [and Worcester], the chalk hills and ending at the plains of the Thames’ (Edwards, 2018). This tells a personal story that goes far wider in time and space.

Watercolor #22 by Walter L. Kubiena (both Podzols with bleached E horizons underlain by Bhs horizons rich in illuviated humus and iron). The Atlas of Soil Profiles,1954

The painting was done by Gertrude Kallab Purtscher and Anton Prazak. Kubiena interpreted the profile morphology, sketching and demarcating horizons, and collaborated with the two illustrators on the colour renderings.