SK26149 73871, an OS Grid Reference pin-pointing the location of the Eagle Stone. A large tower of Gritstone on the moors above Baslow, Derbyshire.
Photogrammetry has rendered the solid form to appear vaporous, the immovable object in perpetual motion. The gossamer and ethereal quality of the 3D render mirrors the magical and spiritual nature of the actual location. According to local folklore Eagle Stone is not only home to witches (Egglestone), at certain times of the year it is also said to move or turn over just like its digital counterpart.
The work is part of an on-going collaboartion with Polly Palmerini www.pollypalmerini.com.
SK26149 73871, Digital Animation, 01:00
Four portals invite close observation of the thingness of rock surfaces.
In the age of the Anthropocene, the work encourages a re-evaluation of our relationship with and our perception of the natural environment. It takes us to a place where time passes at a non-human pace. What we generally perceive as solid, dead matter is in constant flux, undergoing continuous change at a rate that is imperceptible to humans. The work explores how non-human things have an active role in human lives and become active agents in the creative process.
Solid Work Drifting, Giclée Prints in bespoke cloth frame, 10x8 inches, 2021
The work explores how we make sense of place and seek to belong through bodily experience. While wandering through unfamiliar Norwegian landscapes with no direction, no destination, and only a starting point to which to eventually return, I endeavoured to 'take part in the existence of things' as Keats describes it.
Encounters with Glacial Erratics during my explorations gave a feeling of immediate affinity. Like me, they appeared as aliens in the landscape, transported from another place. They stand out from their surroundings, left behind when the glacial ice melted and carried them along no longer.
The box work attempts to encapsulate the physical and emotional relationship to place and relate it to an audience through writing, drawing, photography and small scale 3D paper sculpture. It is an amalgam of truth and fiction, a conversation between physical place and interior landscape.
Erratic Encounters, Artist Book, 2020, 330mm x 331mm x 50mm, edition of 5
Erratic Boulders encountered during walks in the Hardanger Region of Norway have been photographed and isolated from their natural surroundings.
The resulting lack of understanding of scale, depth and relationship with environmental contexts mirrors the process of uprooting and involuntary migration, which they underwent as part of glacial movements. It encourages a re-reading of the boulders as things that are far from inanimate and dead, but things through which we can think, experience and feel. The audience is confronted with shadows and traces of things that are no longer visible in the image, creating moments of confusion and frustration.
Erratic Boulders, series of Giclée Prints, 420mm x 594mm
Pebbles washed up and collected during walks on the shoreline have been drawn and carved into woodblocks to then be randomly reassembled in the printing progress, further layers are added through chine-collé collage. The title alludes to the importance of the object at the same time as alluding to the norse word for assembly or council.
The assemblages play with repetitions of shapes and randomness, fragmentation and reconfiguartion.
Water-based Woodblock Prints (Mokuhanga) on Japanese Kozo paper, 2018
Your Fortune: Regular is a personal response to a four week solo journey through Japan. Through photographs and text the work attempts to express the sometimes contradictory experiences of awe, wonder, confusion, isolation and vulnerability experienced whilst exploring a previously unknown and alien country and culture.
Your Fortune: Regular, Sylvia Waltering, Battenburg Press, November 2015
French-sewn hardback with printed cover, edition of 28.
Status contains seven months of facebook status updates commenting on daily life and current affairs. The more mundane and universal ‘statuses’ are interspersed with subliminal ‘messages’ charting the somewhat stubborn or possibly naïve pursuit of an unwilling lover.
The book is the size of an iPhone, yet it is made using a typewriter and using traditional bookbinding methods, thus also commenting on the changes in human interaction and communication through social networking media and modern technology.
Status, Edition of 25, Summer 2010
Orlando presents the marginalia found in one complete copy of Orlando: A Biography by Virgina Woolf. The original text of Woolf’s novel has been completely removed and the resulting book presents only the comments, writings and scribbles found in the margins of the original paperback. It explores issues of authorship and re-appropriation.
Orlando, Edition of 10, Spring 2012
Individual contributors were selected and approached with the simple request to provide an object that had a special story or memory attached. They were asked to record that story, yet not reveal it. The loaned objects acted as muse and stimulation for writing to unfold, creating new narrative potential. The publication contains photographs of the belongings and the writings they inspired.
A Battenburg Press collaboration - Lucy May Schofield & Sylvia Waltering
Belongings, Summer 2009, edition of 90
The Mrs Day Collections is a collaboration with artist Jacqueline Butler. The work addresses the authenticity of archives and collections and the notion of memory through artistic exploration and response.
Home Truths: The ‘Life’ of Mrs Olive G. Day, Installation, Holden Gallery, Manchester, 2009
Victory Garden: The ‘Life’ of Mrs Olive G. Day, Installation, RHS Tatton Flower Show, 2013
Mrs Olive G Day's Portable Archive Box, Media Materiality: Towards Critical Economies in "New" Media, Asterisk Gallery, San Francisco, USA, 2015.
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