Archive: Nov 2015

Anthropocene

The Geological Spine of Great Britain
from 3 billion years to now
Angela Palmer has created a ‘geological spine’ of Great Britain, using 16 rocks sourced from the length and breadth of the country, representing every geological period spanning 3 billion years of our country’s history. The rocks are polished on one side, showing the magnificent ‘underbelly’ of Britain in complete geological sequence, and left rough on the reverse, as we may encounter them in the landscape. The spine begins with a 3 billion-year-old Lewisian Gneiss from NW Scotland , followed by a 2 billion-year-old White Anorthosite, also from NW Scotland, which is the same type of rock found on the Moon and retrieved by Apollo 15 astronauts in 1971. The penultimate rock in the spine is an erratic boulder, deposited in the most recent glacial episode. Through the sequence of rocks, you will be propelled from Britain’s origin near the South Pole – where Scotland and Northern Ireland were separated from England and Wales by the Iapatus Ocean – to our merging as a nation as we slowly drifted northwards, across the Equator, and towards our current northern location.
Through the sequence of rocks, you will be propelled from Britain’s origin near the South Pole – where Scotland and Northern Ireland were separated from England and Wales by the Iapatus Ocean – to our merging as a nation as we slowly drifted northwards, across the Equator, and towards our current northern location.
The final element in the spine symbolises the Anthropocene, the new geological age to be officially declared in the near future, reflecting man’s impact on the planet; it will supercede the current Holocene epoch. To represent the Anthropocene, the artist has created a rock-like structure in mirror polished steel, to reflect the onlooker. The artist’s ambition is to create the work as a large-scale installation in a prominent public setting, with each rock some 2 metres high, culminating with the mirror-polished steel ‘rock’ in which the onlooker can see himself reflected, life-size.

Brain of the Artist


Angela Palmer’s glass self-portrait, Brain of the Artist, is currently being exhibited in Facing the World: Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei at the National Portrait Gallery in Scotland. The exhibition is the result of a tri-national exhibition of artists’ self-portraits drawn from the collections of three international museums, the Staatliche Kun­sthalle Karl­sruhe in Germany, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyons, France and the National Galleries of Scotland. The exhibition is part of the International Edinburgh Festival and closes on October 16, 2016. Artists include Gus­tave Courbet, Ernst Lud­wig Kirch­ner, Henri Ma­tisse, Max Beck­mann, Andy Warhol, Ma­rina Abramović and Tracey Emin. Palmer’s Brain of the Artist is in the museum’s permanent collection.
The Brain of the Artist was selected by Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, in his book 100 Masterpieces, drawn from Scotland’s three national galleries. Sir John was formerly Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Curator of nineteenth-century paintings at the National Gallery in London.