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In Celebration Of A Tor

Chris Booth 1993

Photograph by Chris Booth

Although it has started to droop a little now, this stone structure has stood for two-and-a-half decades and counting, in the north east corner of the forest, and looks like something that has risen up from the seabed, as it mimics the contours of the rocky outcrop next to it. Chris Booth explains the logic behind the piece in this text, lifted from Bill Grant and Paul Harris' book 'Natural Order - Visual Arts and Crafts In Grizedale Forest Park':

"I feel I should be responding to the stone with stone, therefore to the earth and what shaped the surface here; ice.

Silurian slate was once silt in water, and with fossils was deposited then subjected to enormous metamorphic pressures to eventually form stone.

Technically I tip my hat to the people before, the stone walls they left. However I want to free myself (and the viewer) into a refreshing use of stone, and to create a sculptural form that openly celebrates a particular natural Tor that symbolises this Silurian land.

The sculpture is a mark, a celebratory organic mark that curves as it rises. Curves that are similar to the ice-sculpted Tor it celebrates, curves just like the surrounding ice-sculpted landscape and the trees growing on it (trees too are made of minerals from the land); curves like the original water waves that deposited the silt and the flow shapes of the ice age."

There are many mentions of the Silurian period in Grizedale, a time 400 million years ago when the rock in the area was formed. It has nothing to do with the Silurian tribe of ancient Wales and parts of Britain however, apart from being named after them by the period's discoverer Roderick Murchison, in honour of his friend Adam Sedgewick, who had named his geological period the Cambrian, an old name for Wales (later they found their respective periods actually overlapped and ended up falling out massively). So we have the Silurian Way, as well as Pat Leighton's 'Silurian Cant', plus many other mentions of the period.

As for Chris Booth himself, he has created some huge and impressive works, most of them in his native New Zealand. his most recent sculpture, 'Tauranga Kotuku' consists of three slabs of crystalline sandstone weighing twenty tonnes each, connected by boulders.

Also by this artist:

Slate Flight 1995

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