Stone Diaries

Christine Willcocks combines a range of printmaking, painting, and installation processes to explore notions of museology and the natural world. Inspired by a recent trip to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Willcocks was captivated by the Gallery of Mineralogy, and has been making art about rocks ever since - They are the language of our planet, and tell our stories both past and present.

Diary of Gravity & Intention: On Christine Willcocks’s Stone Diaries  Catalogue Essay by Abbra Kotlarczyk, 2022

The mountain’s story is vertical in the making, horizontal in the telling.  Maria Fusco1 I have a distinct memory of the time a friend made a spontaneous suggestion that I should look up more when I walked. We were young and I was admittedly more accustomed then to looking down, a simple fact that revealed what we’ve both always known: that I’m more melancholic and grounded, while she is more airy and buoyant. A religious or spiritual reading of this general truth might lead us to extrapolate into the axis mundi: the mythological concept connecting Heaven and Earth, or the higher and lower realms, closely related to the Greek omphalos, the stone artefact representing the “navel” or centre of the world. In reality most of us operate within our own centres of gravity, especially while walking; we move in the mid-regions of the horizontal axes, oblivious to what resides all around us. As vertical stanchions, we homosapiens lean into the left-to-right and the right-to-left as the predominant modes through which we communicate the stories of our living days.  In being asked to write about my mother’s (the artist’s) proclivity to reveal the persisting story of rocks, it is not lost on me that my position is as the child responding to the work of the parent. We might call such an act of response or reverence one of looking up–a phrasing that shifts from the spatio-temporal to the symbolic in the growth process from a child to an adult. Plot is a term that strikes me as performing a similar linguistic function: it directs us both to a physical place in the vertiginous ground, whilst conjuring the storied events that occur in the middle ground of our time here.  The observations told in the collection of works that make up Stone Diaries were crystallised after the artist’s visit to the Geology and Mineralogy Gallery at the Natural History Museum while artist-in-residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2014-15. From here we trace the tangible representations of the works to a large plot of basalt lava rock on the artist’s home property on Bundjalung Country, within the ancient Tweed Volcano basin in Northern NSW. Moving further afield, we locate plot through sequences of time and character development, turning to what the geologist Marcia Bjornerud reminds us: that we are all the Earth’s progeny, “the youngest children in a generations-old dynasty” 2.  Where the parent rock refers to the originary rock which, through passages of time and environmental weathering, creates vast arrays of soil-type formations–think of the sandy soils of sandstone; the clays of mudstone–we can move away from strict rock-to-soil ratios into a space of intra-species relationality. The material in our bones, calcium carbonate, is the same mineral we find in the bones of dinosaurs and rocks; iron ore is the same matter responsible for turning our blood cells red in the process of oxygenation. In the metaphysical telling of the contours and textures of these various Geo-characters–some basalt and rhyolite and native to their local ground, others introduced through complex stories of mining, displacement and colonisation–we get closer to the “mysticism of matter” that Marguerite Yourcenar describes at the heart of Roger Caillois’ The Writing of Stones3.  In responding to the deep signatures of fold and cleavage, striation and vesicule, the artist sides with the geologist in attuning to the subtleties of how rocks become richly illustrated mythological texts. In this we are welcomed into the subtleties of the artist’s obsessive journaling, and to what Bjornerud elucidates as the “quieter and less self-aggrandizing” history of the Earth–that “accidental diarist”4. Using the planar language of the progeny’s invention to tell the lapidarian story of Earth’s slow orientation upwards, the artist relies on that most unique Earthlike quality–gravity–to enable drips of richly coloured pigment a downward motility, becoming symbolic anchors in the same way our feet orient us to place.

[1] Maria Fusco, 2015, Master Rock: Repertoire for a Mountain, Artangel / Book Works, p. 10. [2] Marcia Bjornerud, 2005, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, Westview Press, United States, p. 6. [3] Marguerite Yourcenar, 1985, in Roger Caillois The Writing of Stones, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States, p. xiv. [4] Marcia Bjornerud, ibid, p. 4.

ARTIST STATEMENT: These objects, rocks of the everyday, found beneath our feet take on a metaphysical presence when isolated on the picture plane. The museum vitrines and display cabinets, of which have played a large part in my practice, isolate objects; to be seen, observe, research, appreciate, glean knowledge and experience wonder. In the act of creating these rocks a sense of abstraction occurs, giving a freedom to mark making while relying on tone to give them gravitas. These solid and sometime crumbling objects strike a pose in their isolation, confident in their place, carrying a wealth of knowledge. Robert Smithson talks of these shards of rock as text in chapters to a larger story. Photos by Michelle Eabry @michelleeabryARTIST PROFILE:Willcocks has been a finalist in the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2020, 2016, 2014 acquired) and the non-acquisitive $20,000 Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize (2020). In 2015 she was acquired by the Kedumba Drawing Award and was a finalist (acquired) for the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award. In 2014 she was the recipient of the highly sought after Studio Residency at the Paris Cite, facilitated through the Australia Council. Since 2013 she has held the position of Co-Director and lecturer at the Byron School or Art in Byron Bay. Willcocks is represented in numerous major Australian collections including Artbank, The Print Council of Australia, State Library of Queensland, The State Library of Victoria, Queensland University of Technology and Southern Cross University.