Exploring #3: On the Rocks (SHU Space & Place Group event, 16-11-23)
Channel: Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group 
Date: 20/11/2023

This event was the third in Sheffield Hallam University's Space & Place Group's 2023 series: 'Exploring'. For our third session we examined the action and meanings of quarry climbing, lurking and delving subterranean exploration, having examined ruins in session 1, subterranean exploration in session 2 and having a final session, on mountain biking (7 December 2023), still to come.

Forthcoming events can be booked here: https://shu-spg.eventcube.io/

Our presenters for 'On the Rocks' were:

Victoria Lucas (artist)

Quarry Woman: Pixelated Extraction as Material Reckoning 

My artistic research lingers at the edges of materiality and culture, as an interrogation of how the technological dissolution of boundaries might re-orientate female subjectivity in the context of an ecological crisis. I use technology specifically to deconstruct and reconstitute post-industrial sites as artworks, as a method of exploring the web of interrelations between the material, biological, cultural and historical subjects encountered. This ecological approach to artistic practice is contextualised by the post-industrial landscapes of Northern England. Through lingering with nature in the aftermath of material extraction, I visualise new aggregates that de-centre the human subject as part of a post-humanist entanglement of matter. 

Mark Goodwin (poet and climber)

The Tale of The Journey to The Dead Engine in The Shed at The Bottom of Heaven’s Walls: being a poetic voyage into the depths of Dinorwig Quarries

The Tale of The Journey is a sound-enhanced version of a long poem that remembers a collaborative exploration made by a poet, photographer and climber. The original text version of the poem is published in my Rock as Gloss (Longbarrow Press, 2019). This sound-enhanced version is a mix of on location field-recordings, including me performing the poem amongst the slate slabs & rubble of Dinorwig Quarries in North Wales, in January 2018. In January 2009 poet Mark Goodwin, photographer Nikki Clayton and internationally renowned rock-climber Johnny Dawes shared a trip down into Dinorwig Quarries. These vast holes of haunting slate consist of forty galleries, hundreds of feet deep, extending over an area of seven hundred acres. They are a climbers’ playground … and the many tunnels, inclines, winding-houses and vertiginous rusting ladders offer exhilarating and bewitching opportunity for exploration. However, the slate-ancient sadness and pain this place contains is sharp ¬– for these mountainside holes were where many Welsh people struggled and suffered to extract slate … this place killed people. 

Jennifer Wigglesworth (Outdoor Recreation & Tourism Management, University of Northern British Columbia)

“Whose consent do you have to name this in this way?”: Gender and the politics of land in outdoor rock climbing route names.

In outdoor rock climbing, the ‘first’ person who successfully ascends and sets up a route – the first ascensionist – gets to choose a name for it. Some first ascensionists use misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist names for routes, and these naming practices extend across North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Climb the Gap, 2022). This issue is a complex one – the first ascent (FA) tradition is made possible by settler colonialism – with a long history (Loeffler, 1996). The politics of naming routes cannot be divorced from a settler-colonial logic that has long used (re)naming land as a strategy for nation-building. Discriminatory route names were rarely challenged because of the widely accepted tradition of FA naming rights. In this presentation, I use an analysis informed by feminism, anti-racism, and settler colonialism to discuss the implications of naming practices within a shifting cultural terrain. I examine climbers’ reactions to misogynistic route names, and document significant route name changes that took place in Canada and the United States since the summer of 2020. 

Sarah Bowden and Jean Boyd (Art & Design, University of Gloucestershire)

The Quarry: conversations on mobile geologies

A local quarry here in Gloucestershire has been of interest to us, as a site for investigative field trips and ongoing critical reflections. The quarry is both an extraction site for blue lias clay and gravel, sedimented over immense periods of geologic time, and a landfill site, sedimenting new forms of material strata. Through conversation and images we will offer a call-and-response dialogue with the quarry and each other, to consider the contrasts that the site encompasses: of geologic and human histories and their timescales. We question extraction and circulation as economic dynamics maintaining flows of matter, capital and fossil debt between past and future, how mapping, surveying and image-making enable extractive apprehensions of landscape, and the site as an intercalation of storied matter; a mobile geology of deposition and distribution, construction and ruin.