Bernie Colhoun

How do we perceive the expansive timescales of our geologic past when its very nature equates to eternal change and progression, almost incomprehensible to our fleeting human existence?

Colhoun's recent work engages with the physical essence of time, creation and transformation by exploring stone as a material and cultural artefact, enduring and mutable. Constructing snapshots of immensely vast timescales and infinitesimally brief moments she presents the viewer with a passage of time through the notion of the physical world as a record, storing information and memory.

Key influences in her practice are the study of ancient Irish petroglyphs, stone enigmas which act as conduits to unknown stories long buried within the landscape and the science of gemmology and geology which contrasts these uncertainties with an often strange but definitively factual history of the narrative material. Her process is rooted in materiality and symbology, working through sculpture and print to express processes such as the growth structures and metamorphosis of a stone's life cycle to the human manipulation of it and how ancient and contemporary information can be recorded and stored within.

By investigating our Earth's material origins, properties and relationship to our manmade world she establishes a dialogue between our early attempts to encode meaning into the landscape and our contemporary concerns with materiality, time, and history.