This new site-specific exhibition by artists Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux unfolds the complex geological, botanical and human histories within schist.

Stone Moves unfolds the complex geological, botanical, and human histories within schist.

‘Protolith’ describes an original rock, prior to metamorphic transformation. Mud, sand, other minerals and carbon-based material, including plants, combine under immense geological force over time to become the schist that forms the landscapes, foundations, and building materials of our environment.

Gold-bearing quartz veins within schist play a key role in the built history of this region. Introduced gooseberries, currants, sweet briar rose, elder, clover, and thyme remain on nearby historic goldfields. Bellamy and Fauteux have generated soundscapes from microcurrents recorded directly from the leaves of these plants, which trace and echo the movement of people, capital, and ways of seeing.

Stone Moves invites us to reflect on attempts to mediate, divide, and tame our environment. The artists present work which imagines a collapse of time and distance in order to consider new possibilities for relating to the world within and around us.

Other frequencies: a response to Stone Moves is an essay written by Hope Wilson, Curator of Art at Hocken Collections, in response to the exhibition. You can read the full essay online HERE.

Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux are artists who extend the stories of plants and rocks through site-specific research and experimentation. They live between Ōtepoti Dunedin and the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki known as Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.

The artists acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative New Zealand, and the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation.