Honister Green Slate (working title) developed through a period of walking, researching and working with pigments gathered from the landscape around Honister and Fleetwith Pike. While Pigment: A Mountain Walk in Forty Colours traces forty colours through the geology, histories, people and routes of this mountain landscape, Honister Green Slate takes one material — Honister Green slate — as the starting point for a more physical and performative enquiry.
Working at a series of sites within the quarry landscape, I use my body to explore gravity, balance, instability and falling: walking and running across slate ground; ascending and descending slopes; yielding to gravity; falling and coming to rest; and moving through and alongside accumulations of slate and slate dust.
The actions draw connections between the forces acting upon the body and those that have acted upon the rock: weight and pressure, compression and fracture, erosion, grinding, movement and settling. Slate is not simply a backdrop to the performance but a material encountered through the body — underfoot, against the skin and through movement.
The work has been documented through photography and film. A developing series of performance stills brings individual actions and encounters into focus, while the moving-image material will form the basis of a future film.
Concept, direction and performance: Louise Ann Wilson
Camera: Louise Ann Wilson and Nigel Stewart
