Where do I even begin?  At the beginning.

Where is that?

Someone mentioned the 3 billion year history of the United Kingdom. Which begs too many questions.

But then again…where will it all end? It won’t!

The Geological Society’s spectacularly inspiring conference – Earth Canvas – stretched that canvas across of a frame of curiosity, synaesthesia and JOY.  Artists and Scientists came to confer on the overlap…or do I mean subduction?…or orogeny?…of their nominally but fallaciously distinct differences.

We share our lives in landscape…effectively defined by Tom Morisson as ‘Geology, Geomorphology, Water, Vegetation and Culture’.  And, as so evident in the 2 day conference, we are curious (and obsessed) with unpeeling the onion of time and causality that creates (present tense) the ‘ground beneath our feet’.

Pigments, both ground and from the ground, contend with geocomposing (as opposed to geosonification). The answer is 60…or 226…or that we all have personal fossils.

The Geological Society, based in the ‘prestigious’ confines of Burlington House of Picadilly put on a premiere where Hutton met Dante, Titian met Rangeoforma, Adams met …well..me for example.

The resulting conversation …and inspiration…feels like a first step in creating plausible bridges between the unhappily divorced metiers of geoscience and ‘art’…the sensuous and the sensible, the lithic and the erotic, the anaesthetic and the (frankly) libidinous.

There is no distinction.  We are mineral and rock is us.  Life created chalk and trace gas interactions in the atmosphere are our fates.

The challenge over the last 2 months of creating the film poem ‘In-gangin’ has been a meditation – imperfect as zazen always must be – on time and becoming (Dasein maybe but it’s too late to comment.}  The event the Earth Canvas conveners curated challenged me to excellence and inspired me to effort.

This is humanity at its intellectual best…without discarding deep or superficial feeling.

I am grateful to have been in the presence of such craft and wisdom.