Goings on

Aggregate: Glittery stumbles around Blackhill Quarry with Edna Lumb in hand. Rocky Futures . Performed live on zoom on the Thames foreshore, near Blackfriars bridge, London 2023. An exhibition at the T2M conference at Konkuk Academy of Mobility Humanities, Seoul, 25th-28th October 2023, in collaboration with FutureEverything.

https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/rocky-climates/2023/06/21/aggregate-glittery-stumbles-around-blackhill-quarry-with-edna-lumb-in-hand-with-fritha-jenkins/

Extract from catalogue text by Tim Edensor

Moving Rocks; Rocks on the Move

Other playful engagements also testify to the sensory and affective experiences of engaging with rocky matter. Fritha Jenkins brings sandstone fragments and dust from Blackhill Quarry in Leeds, honouring artist Edna Lumb, who painted this site of extraction along with other industrial sites. Jenkins recalls the visceral explosions, the rockfaces, the water sprayed onto the quarry face, the huge tyre prints, the stone cutting and the noise during their own visit to the quarry. They broadcast from the liquefied shoreline of the Thames shore in central London, site of mudlarking and near to the Blackfriars Bridge, the pillars of which are constructed from the Blackhill sandstone. Jenkins mixes the rocks with water, manually plays with them and quantities of dust, in an exuberant performance that concludes with a celebratory dance to the pulsing rhythms of Bronski Beat’s version of I Feel Love, signifying their discovery of a piece of glitter, a vestige of a queer disco that they had attended, that was lodged in their shoe as they explored Blackhill Quarry. This sensuous, ludic interaction with rocks illustrates how, as John Harries (2017: 115) maintains, ‘touch inaugurates a more “proximal” way of knowing’ that ‘proceeds from a reflexive appreciation of the bodily experience of dwelling in the world’. In our touch, he contends, ‘we rediscover the lively being of stone and clay and, through this tactile understanding, some appreciation of the lived experience of long-ago peoples’, as well as those who have worked with stone more recently.

Full text can be read here, https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/rocky-climates/2024/10/20/movingrocks/

In this conversation I extend research which first took shape in the exhibition, Aggregate: Fritha Jenkins and Edna Lumb, curated by Catrionia McCara at Leeds Arts University in 2018. Aggregate constituted an experimental curation open to the public in a constant state of flux. The show explored potential intersections between industrial sites and quarries, feminism, queer sexualities and northern industrial archeology. Using the metaphor of aggregate, stories were cut from the quarried waste glitter rocks brought back into the gallery, performative field trips to quarries painted by Lumb accumulated across the space as video projection, conversations unfolded and folded back into the work, and fragments of archived Lumb communications with industrial site owners, interviews and personal letters tumbled together to propose alternative stoney narratives.

5 years on, for Rocky Futures conversation, I used a similar methodology. The conversation took place on the Thames foreshore, as a means to open up alternative ecologies of the site and connections to the quarry. Stumbling around, under, and through, Lumbs archive material (including her interests in quarrying, feminism and industrial archeology), glittering qualities of the waste material of Blackhill quarry stone, queer quarryings, sandy resource fullness and neurodivergent rocky instabilities, the conversation will speculate upon and propose gritty new ways of aggregating.

With thanks to Keziah Hodgson who performed in the work.