Image from Polar Projects
As a youngster I collected artifacts and curios of all kinds, butterflies, foreign stamps and currency, but mostly artifacts from exotic cultures, and developed a love of natural materials shaped by nature and the human hand.
With pen-pals in every corner of the world, I began swapping finds with other collectors, and eventually with a museum in Basel. The director I believe, thought I had a museum of my own, and over time exchanged a neolithic Swiss axehead and paleolithic flint tools from Le Moustier in the Vezere valley near Les Eyzies.
Much later, travelling in France with my wife Camilla, we headed straight for Le Moustier to experience the caves first hand, a sensation as if coming into contact with your original face. Prehistoric images of animals, dating some 80 millennia, follow natural bumps and forms on the cave walls, the images vibrant with the energy of their makers. And the stone implements in the local museum, exactly the same blue-flecked flints as those I was sent as a kid.
My love for stones shaped by hand or nature has never really diminished from those early days of fossicking and collecting. In December 1993 after a Sound-Culture event in Tokyo, I visited old friends - artists Akio Suzuki and Junko Wada - in Tango-cho, a coastal village far out on the west coast of Japan's main island. Akio and I share a mutual fondness for stones and so we trekked along a beach to where a river meets the sea. I found a pair of song-stones there, one in the river - perfectly round - and the other, on the beach, perfectly flat. Later I discovered that the name of the river - where I found the round stone - is "U" meaning COSMOS, and the name of the beach where I found its pair, "HEI" meaning FLAT. "U HEI" flat-cosmos, a kind of koan, maybe illuminated by the sounds and feel of the stones.
During 1998, I made a pilgrimage of sorts with my family, to remote prehistoric sites around Ireland, England and France, searching out menhirs, stone circles and cairns, and discovered the astonishing dolmen of Gavrinis, on a small island not far from Carnac. Supporting the sides of the 3,500 year old dolmen stand some 23 stone pillars, carved in a complex of intricate spiral, zigzag and herring-bone patterns that resonate across aeons with the mastery of classic Maori carving in wood.
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Philip Dadson
Image from Polar Projects |
Recently I was invited to take up an artist Fellowship in Antarctica and had the good fortune to camp out with a science team in the Dry Valley region, one of the more remote and dry desert locations on the planet. Absent of visible organic life, the living communities there are ice and stone - a condition believed to be similar to the pre-evolutionary state of the planet. On rocky inclines, shards of stone literally prickle up through the earth surface like zillions of teeth. In one valley I nicknamed the Garden of Gods, giant ventifacts stand one from another, like sculptures in an alien temple garden, each surrounded by a frozen crust of exquisite pebbles and sand. Granite forms of every density and texture, blasted and shaped by freezing extremes of winds and temperatures. Stones that speak.