Winspit is a site-specific film installation situated within the abandoned limestone quarry at Winspit on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset. The work engages directly with the quarry's geological materiality and the visible traces of extraction that have shaped its landscape. These traces exist alongside much older geological formations, revealing the quarry as a meeting point between deep geological time and more recent histories of industrial activity.
More Info
The audience's encounter with the work begins before reaching the installation itself. Arriving after dark, visitors are provided with a map and invited to navigate the quarry landscape, encountering the work through a process of movement and discovery. Within the quarry, a series of iPads mounted on a motorised track traverse the quarry floor, recording and re-presenting the terrain directly beneath them. Operating as a form of close material observation, the apparatus scans the quarry surface, revealing textures and fragments that often remain unnoticed within the wider landscape. The slight magnification of the image creates the impression that the ground is opening beneath the viewer, establishing a relational encounter between viewer, apparatus and site. The motorised apparatus functions as both a recording device and a mediating presence within the landscape. Moving autonomously across the quarry floor, it challenges the observer and observed, positioning the viewer within a network of relations.
Alongside this, a 16mm camera records the quarry over an extended duration. Responding directly to changing light conditions, the motorised camera gradually moves from the darkness of the quarry caves towards the cliff edge and the sea at dawn. This movement unfolds as a choreography between machine, landscape and environmental conditions. The analogue qualities of the 16mm image further emphasise the materiality of the recording medium, establishing a dialogue between geological matter, cinematic matter and the traces of human intervention embedded within the site.
Through these encounters, the installation creates a space in which the quarry can be experienced as a dynamic site shaped by multiple temporalities and agencies: geological formation, industrial extraction and ecological processes. The work invites viewers to consider how technologies of recording and representation might reveal the complex temporalities embedded within the landscape, making perceptible relationships between deep time, human activity and ongoing material change.
