Drawings

May 17th

Back at Durlston I visit the household recycling center in the van. I've been OK'd by Dorset CC to take as much stuff as I like for the project. I load up but it's going to be very hard to get enough material like this, as it's a 20mile round trip and we need a huge amount.

In the 'studio' I pin up a series of drawings that I have made over the past week. The drawings are very abstract - bunches and layers of repetitive shapes that swirl into one another. I made them as a way to try and think about how to get small shapes to dynamically make bigger shapes, which contribute to even larger scale shapes. That's all.

Sam has, amazingly, discovered a study made in 1987 on the whole Jurassic coastline east from beyond Swanage along west to Pinhay in Devon. At regular intervals rock samples were collected and the microfossil content logged. There's no analysis, no graphing, just a list of what was found. This is an amazing find - we can base all our analysis on this unused, twenty-year old data set.

The group arrive bang on time in the studio and after some discussion - partly about how to contribute to a blog site - we head down to the beach at Peveril Point armed with some hand lenses and Sam's book. It's an warm clear evening and the Isle of Wight is sharply delineated on the horizon as we spend a happy hour identifying ostrocods and different types of bivalve. You can't move for fossils.

Two group members spontaneously and independently say that the fossilised shells embedded in the rocks look like the drawings I have pinned up in the studio, which is curiously satisfying, as I hadn't somehow made that obvious connection myself.