Private View - Felsenmeer

Felsenmeer curated by Augustas Holcmann and Isis Powers-Bird

Felsenmeer is a multi-disciplinary research project and exhibition developed by artist duo Augustas Holcmann and Isis Powers-Bird, supported through a Mead Fellowship awarded by University of the Arts London.

A ‘felsenmeer’ is defined as an assemblage of angular and subangular rock fragments completely mantling the surface. German, from felsen, fels rock + meer sea Unfolding within Dinorwic quarry, the second largest slate quarry in Northern Wales, the artists’ research a landscape once defined by industrial action, now a scarred terrain where geological time and working-class labour converge. Approaching the quarry as a resonant body, Holcmann and Bird attune to how sound, memory, and matter persist within fractured stone, derelict machines, and mining shafts. Through sculpture, photography, performance, and experimental notation, the artists explore these subterranean environments, excavating the sonic material of the quarry using various seismic microphones and electronic processes.

Here, the landscape is both an archive and an instrument. Every slate barrack, cavern, and abandoned mill holds the traces of human and geological activity whilst reverberating with its own material agency. For the artists, these properties transform the quarry into a site of deep listening, an instrument through which natural processes and industrial traumas intersect.

This exhibition presents a series of objects and recordings which are geographically traceable inside the quarry. By walking amongst these artworks, viewers move through an re-imagined, reassem- bled landscape where each work resonates with its original place of extraction.

Over the course of the exhibition, Felsenmeer will curate a programme of public workshops, panel discussions and film screenings to expand on the themes of the show. Joining the programme is Artstation duo Glenn Davidson and Anne Hayes to discuss how psychogeography, sonic art and archives play a vital part in contemporary art and ecological thought.

Felsenmeer is accompanied by a newly commissioned text from Lucy Broome.