485 million years ago sediments from unnamed volcanic eruptions slowly settled on the hillsides of unnamed mountains. Compressed over millions of years, these sediments combined, forming blueish gray stones, stones that now constitute slate, a defining feature of the landscape and culture of North Wales.

The inactive Dinorwic slate quarry and the peak of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), the highest peak in Wales lie only a few kilometers from each other. The peak of Yr Wyddfa was at the heart of a Victorian tourist industry, while the Dinorwic Slate Quarry was the second largest in the world, roofing much of the industrial revolution in the UK and across Europe. Both locations carry immense importance in the history of industrialization and tourism that have created anthropocentric perceptions of nature as outside of human ‘civilization’ influencing how we perceive natural space today.

‘I Stood at the Foot of a Mountain’ looks to the material histories of slate to consider the temporal and spatial realities that exist within both locations. Reconstitutions through time of the slate into culturally mediated forms, operational devices, and a post industrial landscape mark and break the stones slow lifecycle. The camera acts as a mediator of these histories, slicing out a moment of these stones' journey from dust to dust. Working within the impossibility of truly understanding non-human timescales the camera asks us to notice the collision of temporalities held within the materiality of this space. This allows us to step out of one temporality into another, to reflect on the projected image of one, on another.

Through a re-mediation of space, the geological becomes an inflection point to consider how an anthropocentric vision of the past is re-inscribed on the present. ‘I Stood at the Foot of a Mountain’ records the forms and marks left on the stones of this particular geography, asking us to consider the possibility of accessing a sense of nonlinearity within natural space where human and non-human time-scales collide within the grains of stones.




Stills from Super 8 Experimental Film







KABK Graduation Show 2024