Thinking Through Landscape Patches
Three drawings (inkjet print on matte paper, plexiglass, handwritten text)
25.5 x 33.5 cm (each)
Fluid Earth, Groudwork Gallery, King’s Lynn, UK
8/10/2025 – 13/12/2024
Three prints of digital drawings reflect on encounters with chalk and water during the Groundwork Gallery’s research-based residency in Norfolk, UK.
Small pieces of chalk collected from Hunstanton beach cliffs, from a chalk stream in Flitcham and from Castle Acre Chalk Quarry were 3D scanned using photogrammetry. Their forms are combined with watery creatures, inspired by reflections, fluid movement and flux.
Each drawing carries a handwritten note, linking the presence of chalk to the places where it was found and to the many ways humans have relied on it. These notes, written in the margins of the sketchbook while learning about landscapes and their geological characteristics, reflect on our shared coexistence with other elements, reminding us that we, and everything around us, constantly act and react to one another:
“Erosion moves through rocks, the land reshapes around us.”
“Chalk lifted, crushed, scattered, earth folded into walls, tools, infrastructures.”
“Streams run thick with minerals, they enter bones, fins, feathers, veins, everything drinks, everything carries.”
By layering different kinds of drawing and media into a hybrid image, the work acknowledges that landscapes are never fixed. They are dynamic, porous and always in motion. Chalk, water, rock, human body and infrastructure intertwine. The same forces that shape the ground beneath us also shape our lives. As cliffs crumble, as streams run thin in a warming
climate, as minerals are extracted and seas continue to rise, the story of erosion and extractivism becomes inseparable from our own story.
Work was created for the exhibition Fluid Earth, curated by Veronica Sekules.
Artists: Liz Ballard, Susan Brinkhurst, (CWxWC), Matt Green, Caroline Forward, Shanshan Jiang, Isaac Oloche Johnson, Liz McGowan, Bridget McKenzie, Louis Neale, Mahmood Pouyandeh, Sean Savage-Ferrari, Sabīne Šnē, Rosa Whiteley, El Witley, Michelle Wood
Photos: Groundwork Gallery
Image courtesy Groundwork Gallery and Sabīne Šnē