Isabelle Risner
Moving Boulders
Strategies for managing change along coastlines, under pressure from coastal erosion and sea level rise are expressed in language with battle overtones: ‘Hold the Line' or ‘Advance the line' with hard defences to ‘Managed Realignment' or ‘No Active Intervention'. This piece is concerned with these narratives of control and retreat played out against the backdrop of the sheer scale and dynamism of nature.
Making use of data obtained through collaborative engagement with scientists studying movement of boulders on a rocky coast, the lines and arrows tell the story of the effects of storm on boulders in March 2008. The numbered boulders, some up to a tonne in weight and over a metre in length, were tracked as they moved across a Welsh shore platform over the course of a few days.
Their surprisingly dynamic and mysterious wanderings are the background map and inspiration for this work. The movement is depicted in lines in the porcelain and these are overlaid with patterns representing other types of ‘coastlines', other pressures and elements of coastal imagery and complexity.
It is intended to express a sense of conflicting patterns and knock-on effects, when you move one piece others are out of alignment. We are left with an impression of how difficult it is to see more than a glimpse of order when new movement and new patterns are always emerging. A tension exists between each single panel and the overall pattern, representing the difficulty of making changes in the context of a wider situation.
Special thanks to Dr. Larissa Naylor, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, School of Geography.
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