This ‘field station’— is an apparatus for viewing and recording erratic activity, glacial movements and materialities of the body. It records the activities, experiences and feelings of A Published Event during their 31-day Ruth Stephan Research Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and associated fieldwork in the post-glacial landscapes of New England, USA.

During this research fellowship A Published Event developed an experimental approach to studying ‘erratics’, most commonly understood as ‘glacially transported boulders’ and investigated the origins of the word ‘erratic’, which comes from the Latin ‘errare’, to wander or stray. Through their research, A Published Event came to understand how this term, over time, has wandered through fields of astronomy, theology, cosmology, glaciology, cardiology, psychology, literature and climatology and has come to rest so firmly with geology.

The Erratic Ecologies Field Station, Or an emergent apparatus for speculative research (2019) is a tool or technique for developing a greater awareness and attuning to a given environment. Composed of a set of 62 unique field station cards, each card is an episode; a daily tool for attuning to archive, site, and the confused circulations of the body using languages of metallurgy, deep time and materiality. The accompanying blueprint traces A Published Event’s journey through the holdings of the Beinecke library and across the landscapes of Connecticut and Massachusetts shaped in the wake of the Wisconsin ice sheet some 18,000 years ago. The granite block was sourced from the Stony Creek quarry, in Branford Connecticut, famous for quarrying granite for iconic monuments and landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty. In this work the artists are asking, How might conditions of ‘erraticness’ call us to the present? And how might this calling prepare us to take action? This work is held in the collection of The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Erratic Ecologies Field Station, Or an emergent apparatus for speculative research (2019). Comprising sixty-two copper-foiled episodes, two lengths of solid copper bar, one block of quarried Stony Creek Granite, one archival blueprint. A Published Event. New Haven, CT. Edition of 3.

The Erratic Ecologies Field Station (2019) looks simple enough, but it also gives language to both the physical, linguistic and philosophical dimensions of our experience in Connecticut and is very much an emergent tool for speculative research. It offers the possibility of a new relational field that explores the erraticology of matter itself.

Whilst ‘striation’, names a glaciological term that refers to the scratches and marks left on rocks by the linear action of a glacier, indicating its direction and flow; our term, erraticology might come to name a far more complex and massive organism of deeply affected matter. When the artists talk about hardness, heft or specific gravity (geological terms that are used to describe rocks and minerals), they are re-claiming these qualities to articulate the physical and emotional materials of a more-than-human condition. What has become imperative to their work is to develop a shared language – what the architect Christopher Alexander would call a pattern language – that operates between these specialisations, enabling the erratic to expand experiences of the more-than-human.

Erratic Ecologies: A Field Guide (a short talk by A Published Event)

We would like to acknowledge the Quinni-piac and Mashnatucket Pequot people, as the traditional custodians of the land on which we are meeting today, and upon which we are undertaking this body of research.

We (Justy Phillips & Margaret Woodward) are Visiting Fellows at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscripts Library, here as Ruth Stephan Fellows in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library. Unexpectedly for us, the poet and publisher Ruth Stephan, has emerged as a constant presence during our time here – her ideas and influence we will return to in the latter part of our talk.

As artists, we make long-term relational artworks through shared acts of writing and public telling. Our work is fuelled by an interest in the everyday, chance encounters and constructed situations. One of our key primary sources in the Beinecke’s collection of American Literature is the archive of American artist and publisher now living in rural Ireland, Erica Van Horn. We are drawn to Van Horn’s quotidian observations of small matters – she is a master of chorography – a practice of acutely attending to a part rather than ‘geography’s’ broad sweep, whole.

Today, we would like to move you through one particular striation of our research, the visuals of which will run concurrently with our words.

We came to this research through a proposition of what we are calling, erratic ecologies and what it might mean to field guide the erratic. In this sense, we are testing the possibilities of erratics as; glacially-transported boulders – so, those rocks that were carried by advancing glaciers and deposited away from their bedrock when the glacier recedes; a movement, known as wandering, eccentric and queer; and a metaphysical condition, we are referring to as erraticness.

It is important to acknowledge that as artists, we have forged a very particular direction through the Beinecke’s holdings – a journey that has, in unequal measure, drawn us into a large number of folios, bookworks, maps, archives and a number of ‘errata’ – mistakes, omissions and absences – a publisher’s curse which also derive from the latin errare; compelling us to construct a mobile ‘field station’ to activate these findings; and drawn us into some of Connecticut’s most significant erratic boulder fields.

Since our first day in the Beinecke Library, we have recorded the physicality of our sensing bodies in the Reading Room, through the books we’ve touched, words shared – our fortitude, tenacity and appetite to move-with and through these holdings together. Like all researchers, we keep meticulous records but alongside these we also create other publishable events that enable us to record episodes, in real time, as they unfold. The first of these is titled, Erratic Ecologies Field Station. Composed of a set of unique Field Station cards; a 6 inch length of copper square bar to aid conduction; and a quarried block of Stony Creek Granite for support. This publishing should not be understood as a record of activity alone, but rather as a tool or technique for developing a greater awareness and attuning to a given environment. This is an ongoing practice.

Our Erratic field station looks simple enough, but its ability to give language to both the physical, linguistic and philosophical dimensions of our experience here should not be underestimated. Nor is it a ready-made device that we arrived here with, but was developed from scratch in response to our first seven days in the library. In this sense, it is very much an emergent tool for speculative research.

The transect we are presenting here is significant to us because it offers the possibility of a new relational field that explores the erraticology of matter itself. Whilst ‘striation’, names a glaciological term that refers to to the scratches and marks left on rocks by the linear action of a glacier, indicating it’s direction and flow; our term, erraticology might come to name a far more complex and massive organism of deeply affected matter. When we talk about hardness, heft or specific gravity (geolgical terms that are used to describe rocks and minerals), we are re-claiming these qualities to articulate the physical and emotional materials of our more-than-human condition. What our Beinecke fellowship has enabled is to begin to trace the history and etymology of the word ‘erratic’, which comes from the Latin errare, to wander or stray, and to better understand how it came to rest so firmly with geology. We can now see how this term, over time, has wandered and strayed through fields of astronomy, theology, cosmology, geology, glaciology, cardiology, psychology, literature and climatology. It is in this rich composite of knowledge and language that we are fielding our concept of erraticology. A kind of conglomerate that is accessible beyond any one field. What has become imperative to our work is to develop a shared language – what the architect Christopher Alexander would call a pattern language – that operates between these specialisations, enabling the erratic to expand our experiences of the more-than-human.

In our fieldwork – speculative encounters with books, rocks, fractures, language and people – we practice this verb to ‘field’ as a kind of in-gathering with one’s body, a way of bringing into relation, ideas, objects and experiences, within reach of the sensing body. The collaboration of our sensing bodies includes a 40% loss of hearing in one and a 40% loss of heart function in the other. Because of this we are acutely aware of erratic episodes, sonic, cardiac, or otherwise. For us, any process of field guiding is inherently imbued with frictions and fictions of the erratic. To work this relational field is to focus intensely on what lies between. Between gravel and boulder, block and behemoth. Fieldwork is itself an erratic activity – a deliberate and intentional strategy to shift context, build new relations and attend to a material awareness of place. It allows one to be both in and out of place at the same time.

The Field Station itself draws into relation the seven technical characteristics of minerals; running from Habit on the left to Lustre on the right. Yet within these fields, a fluidity of language enables us to infiltrate these broad geological strokes with movements between the body, glaciology and deep time. Terms such as ablate, quiesce, surge and pluck span both human and glacial organisms. This Field Station enables each of us to record, in any one day, how we ‘feel’ and ‘field’ new knowledge in and through our bodies. This is an ongoing record we have been making for each day of our fellowship. For me, whose heart condition is constantly emitting curious signals, ‘lustre’ is often experienced as ‘dizziness’ and ‘Heft’ as ‘chest discomfort or pressure’. For Margaret, prospecting the library, is a process of attuning to the curious signals of attraction emitted by a particular material. Both episodes might insight a rapid pounding or fluttering of the heart.

Given the extraordinary array of material we have accessed in the last three weeks, we find ourselves thrust into the terrain, inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff names as ‘corporeal geology’. For us, an erraticology of matter seems compelled to begin in the corporeal geology of the heart. It is what we might call, an apprehending of heart matter. The concept that the heart also has a brain – thought to have extensive sensory capacities and able to act independently of the cranial brain has been widely researched at the Institute of HeartMath, in California. What excites us about the direction of our research is that it allows us to draw language through the physicality of body. For us, this digesting takes form through writing and the subsequent manouvering of this physical language through publishing, that is, the act of making public. As a process of research-creation, we always publish as we go.

WEARINESS

I sat with a boulder on my lap.
Around its dim girth my arms strained to strap
It securely and steady its sway.
I hugged the cold weight like a long denied bride,
I laid my forehead against its rude side
And slept. Then it melted away.

[Ruth Stephan, Prelude to Poetry. Editorial Lumen. Lima Peru.]

A.P.E.—Justy Phillips & Margaret Woodward, October 2019.

You can read more about our activities as Ruth Stephan Fellows in New Scholarship at Beinecke – Erratic Ecologies Field Station, an article by Nancy Kuhl, poet and Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

During the Great Depression Roger Babson (1875–1967) commissioned unemployed Finnish Stonecutters to carve inspirational words into large glacial erratic boulders strewn across an area of Dogtown Common, Massachusetts. Babson was a businessman, notable for predicting the Wall Street crash, referred to his commissioning of these inscriptions as “writing my final and permanent book.” Strangely portentous and relevant for current economic and global circumstances, this work holds the friction of human and geological bodies, and brings into question languages and ‘publications’ that bridge human and lithic bodies. This field of 36 carved glacial erratic boulders, now covered by woodland, is commonly known as ‘Babson’s Boulders’.

Pages from Roger W. Babson’s Final and Permanent Book published on Dogtown Common, Massachusetts (2019) form Series 16 of the distributed artwork, Room 26 Discrete Notions Exhibition Series curated by poet Nancy Kuhl. This set of five postcards pays homage to Babson’s boulders, a field of hand-carved erratic boulders on Dogtown Common, Massachusetts. This series is a collaboration between Margaret Woodward, who photographed the boulders during her Ruth Stephan Research fellowship at The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry at the Beinecke.

Room 26 Discrete Notions Exhibition series 16 #2. Five x stamped and addressed digitally printed postcards. Dimensions: 110mmx 140mm. Nancy Kuhl and Margaret Woodward. 2020.

KINDNESS (2019) by Jen Bervin and A Published Event was made during the same field trip by the artists to Babson’s Boulders in Fall 2019.

In March 2016, A Published Event launched their five-year, slow-publishing collaboration Lost Rocks (2017–21) – an accumulative event of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling.

Part artwork, part curatorial platform and part experiment in publishing as art practice, Lost Rocks (2017–21) articulates a library of forty three fictiōnellas composed by forty five contemporary artists from around the world.

At the conceptual heart of this ambitious project sits a discarded geological specimen display board, found by A Published Event at the Glenorchy Tip shop in the northern suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania. Forty of its fifty-six rocks are missing. At once, the rock board is both a decomposing geological taxonomy and a proposition for new mineralogical recomposings of body, duration and event. This artwork seeks to replace the missing rocks, not with geological specimens, but ‘fictionellas’ – processual ‘telling events’ of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling.

In Lost Rocks (2017–21), it is the material metamorphosis of absence that enlivens the library to its public. Not forgetting that the rock board itself is already a published work and has a public of its own, including amongst others, the person who compiled it, perhaps as a study aid; the salvage workers who saved it from the tip face; the 45 contemporary artists who attempt to re-compose it.

Despite its small size, the geological diversity of lutruwita/Tasmania is quite remarkable. Present in abundance are mineral deposits and rocks from every period of the Earth’s Middle Proterozoic era, a period that began over 2.5 billings years ago. As the first continents appeared so did the first fossils of living organisms.

Commissioned artists: Margaret Woodward (TAS), Justy Phillips (TAS), Jane Rendell (UK), Sarah Jones (TAS), Ross Gibson (AUS), Ben Walter (TAS), Ally Bisshop (Ger), Greg Lehman (TAS), James Newitt (TAS), Therese Keogh (AUS), Mary Scott (TAS), Rory Wray McCann (TAS) Julie Gough (TAS), Tine Melzer/ Markus Kummer (Sui), Raymond Arnold (TAS), Jerry de Gryse (TAS), Trygve Luktvasslimo (Nor), Lucy Bleach (TAS), Wendy Morrow (TAS), Ruth Hadlow (TAS), Louisa King & Jo Kinneburgh (NSW), Shevaun Cooley (WA), Perdita Phillips (WA), Tricky Walsh (TAS), Lyndal Jones (VIC), Bianca Hester (NSW), Catherine Evans (Aus/Ger), Caroline Loewen (Can), Helena Demczuk (TAS), Nancy Kuhl (US), Robin Banks (TAS), Erica Van Horn (US/ IRE), Ilana Halperin (UK), Jen Bervin (US), Loren Kronemeyer (TAS), Chris Henschke (VIC), Sofie Burgoyne (TAS), Katie Stackhouse (VIC), Polly Stanton (VIC), Siddharth Pandey (Ind) and Dominique Chen (QLD) & Tom Blake (NSW).

The Lost Rocks (2017–21) fictiōnellas are gestures, small movements that shift the axis just enough to feel it move but not enough to notice it moving. They are not, as so much of contemporary art practice aspires to be, spectacular. The works are soft and deep and raw and sharp, much like the rocks that did or did not come before them. A pulping of lithic love no less.

Whilst maintaining a strict conceptual framework to the Lost Rocks (2017–21) fictiōnellas (all content should be drawn from lived experience), a consistent design style and production format; we allow the library itself (its holdings) to be punctuated by intrusions.

In geological terms, an intrusion manifests as an inward burst, magma that cools and solidifies within the Earth’s crust. In the library, we explore intrusions as events that erupt and interrupt – between the writing of the rocks – creating new flows and relations between rocks, minerals, authors and readers. So far these intrusions have taken the form of live readings, curatorial residencies, installations of drawings, video and sculpture, lithic poetry salons and perhaps most intriguing of all, in the gifting of minerals and rocks. In a way, these intrusions become the new bedrock – the new caneite board, and in doing so, become a way of holding context and materiality as one. An attempt to gain a bearing, to crystallise a voice.

This ambitious work is funded through crowdfunding, book sales, library subscriptions and over its six year duration, a number of competitive arts grants. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This activity was assisted through Arts Tasmania.

Published in a limited edition of twelve the Lost Rocks (2017–21) Deluxe Edition Field Library comprises: A complete set of forty three Lost Rocks (2017–21) fictiõnellas; two cuts of stichtite serpentine; two blocks of rare Tasmanian timber; one copper-etched plate; assorted postcards; field library case in hand-made in Tasmanian oak and Huon pine by designer/maker Linda Fredheim; including fixtures of brass, stainless steel, plastic and felt; signed edition certificate.

Download edition profile pdf.

Lost Rocks (2017–21) Seam IX was launched on the occasion of the inaugural Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair. Hosted online due to pandemic restrictions, in 2021 Printed Matter, the New York-based art book specialist migrated their New York and LA Art Book Fairs into one spectacular online event. Since 2005, Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs have hosted international exhibitors featuring a wide variety of works—from zines and artists’ books to rare and out of print publications, and contemporary art editions. This new Fair expanded upon the rich tradition of our long running Art Book Fairs, including over 400 exhibitors from 43 countries, with online programs, performances, games, and more.

The PMVABF invited audiences to browse, buy, participate and converse with hundreds of artists through a system of dedicated websites, constructed for the occasion of fair. It was in this unchartered territory that we launched Lost Rocks (2017–21) Seam IX: Fossil by Ilana Halperin (US/ Sco), Fossil by Erica Van Horn (US, Ire), Fossil by Robin Banks (Aus), Copper by Loren Kronemyer (Aus), Silver by Jen Bervin and Granite by Nancy Kuhl (US).

Through A Published Event’s PMVABF Lost Rocks (2017–21) project site, we hosted a number of readings, conversations and interviews by our Seam IX artists. Here is a selection of those publishings, generously created by collaborating artists and produced by A Published Event.

Nancy Kuhl (US) reads an extract of her fictiōnella, Granite for Lost Rocks (2017–21) by A Published Event. 2021.

Erica Van Horn reads an extract from her fictiōnella, Fossil Lost Rocks (2017–21) by A Published Event. 2021.

Epoch Wars Manifesto by Pony Express. Loren Kronemyer, Copper Lost Rocks (2017–21) by A Published Event. 2021.

Ilana Halperin, Fossil, 2021 and Justy Phillips (A Published Event) in conversation on grief and other losses. A Published Event.

Robin Banks reading from her fictiōnella, Fossil (2021). Filmed with Izzy von Lichtan, curator, Rock Library and Geological Museum, University of Tasmania. A Published Event. 2021.

Lost Rocks (2017–21) Seam VIII launched online as part of Listening in the Anthropocene, Exhibition + Symposium, hosted by Charles Sturt University. Seam VIII artists and rocks featured; Granite by Helena Demczuk (Aus), Red Sandstone by Caroline Leowen (Can) and Copper by Catherine Evans (Aus/ Ger). You can access the video recording of Lost Rocks (2017–21) Seam VIII here.

Included in the video recording are these two readings from Berlin-based Australian artist Catherine Evans and her fictiōnella, Copper.

Catherine Evans, reading an extract (I) from her fictiōnella, Copper for Lost Rocks (2017–21) by A Published Event.

Lost Rocks (2017–21) Seam VII was launched online launch via Zoom on the 12th of June 2020. The event is presented in partnership with Negative Press, Melbourne.

Listen to artists Bianca Hester (Sandstone), Lyndal Jones (Granite) and Tricky Walsh (Stalactite) discuss their slow-publishing fictiōnellas with A Published Event co-founder Margaret Woodward. The event is generously convened by Dr. Laura Harper, Monash University, Melbourne. A Published Event 2020.

The launch of Lost Rocks (2017–21), Seam (VI): Fossil by Perdita Phillips (Aus), Granite by poet Shevaun Cooley (Aus) and Marble by artists Louisa King (Aus) and Jo Paterson Kinniburgh (NZ/Aus) took place in Europe across A Published Event’s participation in two great art book fairs. First came the Boston Art Book Fair, 2019, followed weeks later by the Small Publisher’s Fair at Conway Hall in London.

The occasion of Fossil Performance by Wendy Morrow (soundscape by Leigh Hobba with technical assistance by Dylan Sheridan) celebrates the launch of Lost Rocks (2017–21), Seam (V): Rhyolite by artist Lucy Bleach (Aus), Granite by artist Ruth Hadlow (Aus), Mudstone by artist and film maker Trygve Luktvasslimo (Nor) and Fossil by dancer Wendy Morrow (Aus).

I only know what I saw. That night in the dark. Residues of gunpowder. Labour hard felt. Lime wash. Woodworm. Soft blue light in the rafters.

She had already washed the floor but I didn’t see any of that, only the aftermath that started on the floor and crept ever so slowly through the walls beyond the oak lining and all the way to the white brick line. For the photographer, who scornfully berated the building for some time later, this line was not a line but a devision of equity. Of light and dark. It, standing out like the invasive beacon it was. When the palawa were murdered in their thousands. The light, she said, out there (gesturing far beyond the copper lined door) would never reach such heights nor depths in the lands this Magazine was built to protect. One kilometre. Two kilometres beyond the ground line. It’s just like the great king Osiris said, ‘Water darkens everything’.

Earlier in the week, two biologists took to the floor for the Friends of the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. Molluscs and soft bodied corals filled the room in all the muted colours of a world full of black out there and far below. Not so far south from here, the deep sea coral reefs of the Continental Shelf, flank the edges of vast seamounts. Invisible mountains with names like Pedra and St Helens. In my childhood in the north of England, St Helens was a rough industrial city. Hard to imagine its slopes flooded with soft corals tethering water to rock, the likes of which were on show in the Royal Society room this week. And urchins that feed directly from the water column by elongating their spiky bodies upwards upwards. Beyond this mass of black water.

As the body slowly slowly moves with the gestures of fossil’s making, it begins to absorb its own column of softly folding air, begins to collect the small piles of woodworm dust that before this movement, collected only where beams and posts touch floor. It is not the artist who moves, but the shadows of her othering, the saturating sinkholes, the years of muscle memory – the lines of words and thinking, always repeating from the core. This is how she writes her moves. How her moves re-compose the space.

For many of the audience, this is their first time in this extraordinary Gunpowder Magazine. Built in 1853 by convict labour, a significant feature of this Battery was a Hot Shoe Oven in which the balls were heated to red hot before being loaded and fired at wooden vessels. The vaulted brick ceiling was laid without mortar so that it, rather than the entire building should be blown clean off, in the case of accidental incendiary explosion.

FOSSIL performance, an exquisite opening of the space, of the seam, of Granite, Rhyolite, and Mudstone amongst it’s delicate layering of life and death, a synchronicity of rocks that never touched. Before. In the artist’s words, a penetralia of sorts; ‘the innermost secret parts and recesses; to go within, between rock and body, mysteries and doubt.’ (Morrow)

Margaret saw the stumps of Huon Pine and I asked if we could rent them. Huon Pine $40 NOT DRY. HUON PINE $95 NOT DRY. HUON PINE $95 NOT DRY

She was the one who thought they might be good things to own, if only for a month on the Eastern Shore. Good beings for you to confide in perhaps, whilst in the presence of other petrifying, fossilising schisms. In the back room of a well known furniture showroom down the Channel, planks of rare and hard to find Tasmanian timber are stacked like well thumbed books along the length of each wall. Three felled torsos decapitated on the floor. In black marker pen their pitiful price is instantly reduced when the owner agrees to buy them back for half their value at the end of the show.

Heading down the Outlet, the three of them begin to suck the sunlight from our car, these half-price-three-thousand-rings-on-the-small-one-perhaps logs start to seep our cheapening souls. Start to fill us with cycles of a life we’ll never see. Stop it. All we care about is the price. And the fact that they are still, after all these years, not dry. Not dry enough for a kitchen bench top. A peanut bowl. A left handed salad server. All we care about is the price and their torso smell. Their slowly-slowly making-public smell.

You must be standing in the forest now, perhaps decapitated too. Grounded in the roots of an ancient tree. Scott drew that one from a 19th century book owned by her grandfather, Eric Oswald Scott. A ‘fish man’. Or ichthyologist. His grandfather, Herbert Hedley Scott was a Palaeoxylologist – a wood man. In Petrified Wood, Scott meticulously traces the wise shape of Herbert Hedley, cleft in the roots of trees and other earthly matters. Here in the gallery, in graphite on untreated Ply, an image of a dis-assembled Oak. Limbs akimbo. Breaking down. Scott’s drawing suggests another technique for caring for the-lack-of-care. For as she writes to Herbert Hedley, ‘No one listens to the trees anymore’ (Scott 2018). Opposite Scott grinds cement dust or is it fossil casts.

Most likely, your soul’s been hijacked too.

Splinters axe the room from corner to corner. Facets of light split the screen. Split the logs. Leach the years before and after us. I’ve read Keogh’s Petrified Wood, hauling ancient logs up from the well. Her wax cast faceting of an underground marking surface hides the deepings of lost knowledge far below. In her fragmented gestures, Keogh scribes seven thousand years in the blackness of dark water.

‘Thousands of triangles were arranged in the shape of the timber beam made up of an expansive tetrahedral mesh, the digital plank was formed like crystalline structures. A singular dynamic movement wasn’t captured in a surface, but entered into a system of inertia through the untimely accretion of digital data. No single triangle came first. Instead, they co-emerged within a sprawling terrain.’
(Keogh 2018)

Her words flow ceilings into dust, split the concentric hearts of others.

Wide open. Mother and son. Lie side by side in polished vitrines. Or do I mean latrine. A communal toilet where two halves of a brain struggle to strike each other clean. All this in close proximity of Keogh’s hand-made adze. The Newitt’s are here together, appearing as concentric forms. Fistfuls of clay and a pointing finger are all that’s left to stop the weight of all this paper. Balls of perishing held in crisp white vitrines.

I try to calculate the cost in years of living organism. $40 for a 3ft length of someone else’s torso. I estimate one thousand years, thirteen thousand five hundred and eighteen turnings of the moon. And back again, Still. Not dry.

High in the rafters Scott writes a mirror, so we can all see what we choose to see in this reflection of communal perishing. Newitt has clearly been here before. In Fossil (2018);

We’re very sorry …

The disconnection of standing next to myself, hearing the anguish, so sorry, in my voice while feeling a deep sense of relief bubble in my chest. Almost joy. Being shocked at how bad I am at pretending grief. Thinking about breakfast. Wondering if I could do eggs.

– ready for you

Turned on a lathe perhaps, Scott’s grove of ready-mades. Weapon-like, decorative, salvaged tools that could have cut the the wood that Keogh’s spent months hauling out of the well. Could have carved and stitched the wound that his mother absorbed as the waters rose and blackened around her.

Large drawings of rings within rings give way to softer observations.

© A Published Event 2018.

‘In the room, we’d like to welcome to Basalt (Ross Gibson), Conglomerate (Ben Walter), Marble (Ally Bissop), Crystal Bone (Greg Lehman).’ Lost Rocks (2017–21) Seam II, Basalt. Conglomerate. Marble. Crystal Bone. was a feast for the ears during a subscriber-only event held at Etties Paino Bar in nipaluna/ Hobart. Readings from Ross Gibson, Ben Walter and Greg Lehman. Cocktails and conversation into the night.

A female mannequin in steel-grey overalls and wide smile wears yellow rubber gloves. Hands resting on hips, her safety helmet (has clearly taken a knock or two) suggests the need for vigilance. And feeling. Where the weight of words might fall. Might injure. Might turn living, breathing life into inanimate beings that populate museums just like this one. We move in unison to a central room filled on every wall with books and rocks and bits of equipment that measure and weigh. Assay.

Dressed in black and flattened oyster shell, Crocoite opens her mouth. Speaks slowly through the ologies of her life. The rocks do not move. The minerals stay in orderly lines. One after the other. Beneath the safety glass. She reads.

We follow her into the World Class Mineral Room, filing past, one by one, the giant replica gold nugget.

Encased in a brass-lined mineral display case are the rarest specimens of red-lead clusters. Shards of crystaline crocoite illuminate her books. She reads in swathes of red, divining rivers and fathers and men who cut tracks and fight in wars and die in seas. A prospecting of relations.

We walk again. This time, over lush green grass and blistering light to the Underground Mine Simulation, that’s cleverly built above the ground from red brick and timber. Inside, every surface beyond the dirt floor has been blasted with shotcrete.

Silver/ Lead speaks softly but with conviction from the start. Paints the cosmos with ink and water onto a giant screen that absorbs her voice into its porous skin and fills the parched cells of every living thing beneath this earth.

Thirteen seconds from the end, she takes a spade and cuts in two, an earthworm. The mantle breaks. Opens. Swallows.

Another cut. In the Power House, Urs Fischer’s, You gouges a massive hole in the floor of a New York gallery. Something about grains of sand falling from a woman’s shoe and the sedimenting cutting of a hole that is alive. A hole that beats with a heart and a car stereo speaks Crocoite through a set of home-made speakers.

Walking again, snaking over the green green grass and up the concrete ramp. The Court House, basks like a sun fish in the great yellow light of an Indian summer. A drama for eight players. Scene 3. I am the RepRisk Analyst, perform my lines alongside Silver’s CEO, Police Prosecutor and Philosopher (makes a late but dignified entry).

The audience ask questions and the sun starts to shy away. Now we are all touched, or maybe tainted. The court room jaundiced in the dying light. We head to the Cecil for Riccadona and Jimmy Barnes.

Four distributed events by Crocoite: Margaret Woodward (AUS) in the World Class Minerals Room, Crocoite: Justy Phillips (AUS) in the Power House, Silver: Jane Rendell (UK) in the Court House and Silver/Lead: Sarah Jones (AUS) in the Underground Mine Simulation at the Zeehan School of Mines and Metallurgy, as part of Sites of Love & Neglect, curated by Jane Deeth for Ten Days on the Island 2017.

These site-specific events are each expanded from the artists’ four fictiōnellas, part of Lost Rocks, (2017–2021). Hobart: A Published Event – and take the form of sound, video, object and live performance. The work is open from Saturday 18th March – Sunday 26th March 10am–4:30pm daily (114 Main Street, Zeehan). There will be live readings on Saturday 18th March, 4:30pm, 5:00pm and 5:30pm.

We launched The People’s Library in late 2017, with the invitation, ‘Amateur or professional, we are actively seeking contributions from those who write for leisure, pleasure or necessity’.

‘Tethered in everyday acts of writing, reading and telling, The People’s Library is an invitation to write an original book-length work in any genre. Part performance library, part contemporary artwork, The People’s Library will publish one hundred and twenty three books – unpublished works of fiction, memoir, science fiction, biography, non-fiction, history, crime, thriller, poetry, plays and experimental other.

An opportunity to leave a trace, locate a life or sweep a narrative arc within a living library, The People’s Library is a supported publishing opportunity which invites its writers to contribute to a unique, collective artwork to be installed at Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart in 2018, creating a movement of public tellings – book groups, live readings, salon events and lending library. A groundswell of histories, cultures and experience awaits.

By New Year’s Day, 2018, over 170 people felt compelled to submit an expression of interest to The People’s Library along with sample pages of their writing, and 123 were selected to write book-length manuscripts – of these we received and published 113.

The 113 books of The People’s Library are catalogued both by colour and the sequence of their acquisition. The colour assigned to each book corresponds to the 110 colour tints of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts by P. Syme.

Werner’s nomenclature corresponds with poetic lyricism and scientific precision to the most commonly occurring colours of the ‘natural’ world. Published in 1814 by eminent Prussian mineralogist and geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, the palette was later adapted by Scottish flower painter and art teacher, Patrick Syme (1774–1845) to include additional colours observed in animal and vegetable realms.

Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours quickly became the go to companion for artists and scientists charged with classifying and cataloguing the colonies. This is the book Charles Darwin used to describe the colours he observed on his HMS Beagle voyages (1831–36). On this voyage Darwin visited Hobart Town in 1836, where he was certainly accompanied by the Werner/Syme colour book on his walks around Sullivan’s Cove, the future site of the sandstone warehouse that now houses the Salamanca Arts Centre. In Darwin’s journals from the HMS Beagle voyage, the use of Werner’s colours is well documented, including the snake he found in 1835, described as ‘Primrose yellow’ (Colour Number 63).

The process of recording the material world of lutruwita/Tasmania through European-tinted lenses was by now, well underway – the legacy of which persists as a deeply entrenched system of naming that continues to prioritise the European view. Werner’s toolkit is an inventory of a European world. In Tasmania it was used as a device to make sense of and impose a familiar order on an unfamiliar place.

Our decision to furnish The People’s Library with Werner’s colour palette might be seen as yet another extension of the European impulse to catalogue and impose. And it is. It’s a deliberate strategy to recognise that this guidebook, this portable landscape that accompanied scientists, artists and colonists, is freighted with its own narratives and hierarchies of a nonhuman world: 24 Scotch blue; 40 Imperial purple; 48 Leek green; 76 Dutch orange; 95 Cochineal Red; 27 China Blue.

By way of turning our bodies away from these dominant histories and towards each other, towards ‘other material forms, or immaterial apparitions’, we add our own ecology to this weighty inventory of colour. At first we see if its possible to meet the demands of this ecology by using Werner’s naming conventions.

We decide to disrupt Werner’s system by inscribing three new entries on the colour register, named through our research in the material sites of The People’s Library. Returning us to the centre of all this growth is book 111, Repeat Pattern by Tracey Diggins. This free-verse poetry from the core is held in place by Defunct Board, colour matched to the Burgundy upholstery fabric of the boardroom chairs from the now defunct Triabunna Woodchip Mill. Swatch 112, Paintings in my Mind, a book by Queenstown poet Leo Deacon finds its tint in the touch of Bulky Paperback. Swatch 113 inscribes the library’s final acquisition, Memoirs of a Travelling Sheila. Written by Dunally artist Gay Hawkes, a bookend of Modified Timber inspired by the Long Gallery’s pre-colonial timber beams.

Like breadcrumbs on a forest floor, these words inscribed on the gallery’s long white entry wall, are perhaps both map and calling. Inside, the storehouse is sliced in two. From snow white to eucalypt blue, a double- sided arc of books holds one convict-built wall from another. A 16m long bookshelf – diagonal severing of spectral flow. Oriented Strata Board spills from beneath the covers. Crosses the floor in fits and starts. A cabin for reading built from a compacted forest of giant woodchips.

This is where I take myself, take the book I was handed on arrival. Styx and Stones sits side by side on a spine-deep ledge with Peopling The Dirt Patch. Imperial Purple bruising Honey Yellow in the fray. There’s a hexagonal stage. I overhear another visitor say that’s where they used to roll the logs before grading and chipping them into pulp. A hard stand they call it. On the south side of the library there’s a table for reading and 11 boardroom chairs. To the right, complimentary tea and coffee served in hand-built ceramic vessels imprinted trees. Cut from tongues. Beanbags cluster like leaf litter beneath the gallery’s sunlit windows. I take a seat, it’s less comfortable than it looks. Woodchips, it turns out, aren’t the softest filling. I slump into the forest and read and read and read.

The collective holdings of The People’s Library compel us to find new ways of holding these books and their writers in our care. Our hold is both intimate and encompassing. The library as a living organism is always bigger than the sum of its holdings. And we are all enlarged by it, knowing that assemblages of books, objects, events, ideas, materials and conversations held in close proximity behave differently than those kept alone. We make libraries because we crave proximity. In the words of artist Brandon LaBelle, ‘I speak in order to locate myself near you.’

In the Ancient Library of Alexandria, Egypt, founded circa 295BC, the Ptolemies attempted to assemble in one place, the knowledge of the ‘known’ world. They sought to collect, buy, steal, copy, cheat or otherwise acquire a copy of every book in existence, to ‘create a hub for research, learning and cultural exchange’1. And then they invented a way to digest that knowledge, to distribute and share it. In The People’s Library we have made a curious digesting creature of our own. We gave it a name and prodded it all over to see what it might choose to reveal. About this place, it’s people, languages, absences and imaginations. We excluded no one. Only things that were for one reason or another, too difficult to hold.

Inviting celebrated scholars from many countries (including Euclid and Archimedes) to take up residence in the library, the Ptolemies paid them a handsome retainer and asked no more of them in exchange than that they use the libraries resources. We decided to establish a Readers in Residence program of our own. We commissioned three artists: Ross Gibson + Kathryn Bird (NSW); Fayen d’Evie (VIC) and Unconscious Collective (TAS). We asked them to be curious. To use their bodies, hearts, souls to ‘read’ this strange performance library.

Perhaps at the bottom of it all, we wanted to ask: How might we (authors, readers, feelings shared in the company of others) hold in the palm of our hands, intimate gestures of a place and time known only by those who have come to live them? Come to hold a life just long enough to record it? To suture it?

In Fall, now a river. Now a leech. Now a hook on a line on a rod on the arms of a man who walks with the night in a sweat-stained cornflower collar. Black lipped. Tight lipped. Union is strength, Phillips and Woodward invite a site-specific publishing of their ambitious hydrographic score, Fall of the Derwent (26 November, 2016). Made public with one hundred hand-to-hand publishers, this reading score is a marking, cutting, flooding deluge in the making. Each line, released through the current Energy in Storage Levels of the River Derwent. It is a call to move-with the river of life. An actual, mythical event in the making–already made felt. A moving blackwards. No less.

Readers: Cullen Butters, Jerry de Gryse, Ruth Hadlow, Sarah Jones, Clare Larman, Justy Phillips, Colin Maier, Amanda Robson, Margaret Woodward.

SATURDAY.

With black in hand, the readers stand. Some of them lean as the concrete shimmers. Others scan the crowd for a flicker. A shifting eye. A presence of something so slight. Yet leaking.

Clinging to their skin, a blanket of tree dust. The dying atoms of tree flesh and tree roots and tree leaves that once were green and ochre. Some of them purposefully spread the little black atoms up their arms. Touching now and then, the sweet spots of the neck. Brush hair from a fringe. Rub their fingers against the smooth of their lips and let the black just sit there. Some might call it an attractor to a river. A magnet that calls her glassy silver spine up and into their liver. Until they lick it clean. The black. Let the tree fall deep and fast into their chest. Let the dust settle.

I’ve had my eye on a teenage reader. Slumped against the glass that’s pink and shattered. He is different to the others, tries in vain to stop the blackness from feeding his palms. With his eyes he draws a line across his wrist and then tries really hard not to break it. He can’t see the small black mark on the side of his face that’s about to bite him hard.

The black’s unruly. That’s the problem as far as I can see. And I’m just an innocent bystander. I look at my hands. Now I’m the one who’s staring.

It’s just after sunrise on the Alum Cliffs. A pacific gull splayed upside down in the pit of a broken tree. Should have taken more care.

Her telltale red-tipped bill bleeds orange into the great yellow disk of the sun. All these years of life’s tethering. Osiris, god of the dead, whispers, inside our salty breath, water darkens everything.

I can’t quite work out what’s going on. But one of the readers comes and stands alongside. Opens a small black book and starts to read aloud. It’s funny, at first it’s not their voice that I can hear but I watch intently, their silvery lips moving up and down the river. The sound is coming from behind and to the right. It’s a woman. An older woman’s voice. And now there are people laughing. Amongst themselves. And others listen. But the man at my side does not leave me. Does not stop his reading. Not for the noise. Nor the river that’s trying to draw him blackwards. It’s sad what he’s reading, the parts I can hear anyway. Something about a man in a moss-filled forest. A pair of lungs full of river. When he looks up, the reading man, I think he’s crying. But he’s not. It’s me. Have the tears come up and out of me yet? I can’t tell where my skin in any more. He looks me right in the eye, the man. Doesn’t say a word. Just places his finger into the length of the book. As if to remember himself to the page. Brings the covers together and places it into my open hands. I am a raven full of maggots. A broken mother of pearl. Shards of light from the shell illuminate the maggots. Sets off a feeding frenzy obliterating dark matter from the hold.

Whip snake.

Sessile oaks and ash and rowan. All the body’s vital organs. In the hold.

The wind’s picked up. Small white crests are whipping new peaks into water. I don’t want to open the book. Not right now.