Caroline Bugby
23 February – 12 March 2022
‘Outrageous Cretaceous’
‘Outrageous Cretaceous’is an immersive, tactile environment enhanced by a creative soundscape. Passing through a sculptural ‘chalk’ archway into a surreal and vibrant installation, viewers are encouraged to contemplate the chalk deposits that shape the local area, which were created during the Cretaceous period around 80 million years ago.
A new work that considers the deep time history that has shaped the place we call home.
Much of our local landscape in West Kent was formed during the Cretaceous period, up to 100 million years ago. A time of heat, when warm shallow seas submerged the entirety of South East England and the skeletal remains of marine organisms built up in a thick layer on the sea floor. This slow process created the great slabs of chalk that ripple through our landscape, giving form to the undulating downs and providing specific habitats for flora and fauna.
Through sculpture and installation, Caroline explores these themes with a light touch and an eye for the poetic and the absurd. A portal opens in a hillside, referencing both an entrance and chalky jaws, bursting with ammonite spirals and baring stalactite fangs. Visitors are invited to cross this bizarre threshold and consider our place in the very long and very grand narrative of the rocks under our feet.
This exhibition represents the opportunity both to scale up my practice and investigate new narratives around ideas of connectedness with time and landscape.
Caroline will be in the Gallery:
Running alongside the exhibition are workshops with local children and adults with mental health issues, tailored to exploring the different ways that we are able to connect with local landscapes and histories through creative practice.
Outrageous Cretaceous
Caroline Bugby
Pulped recycled paper, green faux fur, glitter, cotton, ink, copper wire, paint, glue, light gels. Sound recorded by visual and voice artist Bo Lanyon
Script written by Caroline Bugby
This installation considers the deep time history that has shaped the landscape of the South East, focusing especially on the chalk of the North Downs which lie just a few miles from Sevenoaks.
Much of our local landscape in West Kent was formed during the Cretaceous period, up to 100 million years ago. A time of heat, when warm shallow seas submerged the entirety of South East England and the skeletal remains of marine organisms built up in a thick layer on the sea floor. This slow process created the great slabs of chalk that ripple through our landscape, giving form to the undulating downs and providing rare and precious habitats for specific flora and fauna.
Through sculpture and installation, Caroline explores these themes with a light touch and an eye for the poetic and the absurd. A portal opens in a hillside, referencing both an entrance and chalky jaws, bursting with ammonite spirals and baring stalactite fangs.
The sound piece which forms part of the installation reflects on the transformative processes which created the chalk over millions of years – from algae to ooze to the crumbly white chalk we are so familiar with today. Concerns about climate change and habitat loss in our current moment are alluded to by looking to the conditions of the Cretaceous, with its melting ice caps, rising sea levels and mass extinction. As such, the Anthropocene might be considered a shocking, or outrageous, Cretaceous. The plants and butterflies whose names are listed like an incantation at the end of the portal’s speech are all dependant on chalk grassland for their home. This delicate habitat is becoming increasingly rare, with 80 % lost since the Second World War.
Circles of intermingling colours hang in the space, edged with bumpy gold frames. These abstract formations of swirling colour are taken directly from geological maps of the area made in 1799 by geologist William ‘Strata’ Smith. Sevenoaks, Tonbridge and Box Hill all feature. The different colours denote different types of rock; chalk is represented by green.
Visitors are invited to step into the mouth of the portal that looms within the gallery and consider our place in the very long and very grand narrative of the rocks under our feet.
The Portal’s Speech
Recorded by visual and voice artist Bo Lanyon Written by Caroline Bugby
The Portal speaks…mediator between past, present and future states. Navigate the chalky threshold – consider the Cretaceous.
Aqueous world of sizzling temperatures – the ice caps have melted, disgorging their watery contents and submerging this place.
A slow, dripping kind of change. Not all geological processes are this gradual… Outrageous Cretaceous
It is 100 million years ago. Where you stand now is underwater. Saturated by a strange sea.
Ammonites abound, before they were markers of time, when they were living things with tentacles and appetites.
Calcareous Ooze coats the seabed in a thick white carpet – a gloopy snowscape sculpted by winnowing currents.
Outrageous Cretaceous
Clouds of algal blooms swirl in these shallow seas, curdling the water to a milky blue with their skeletal remains.
Calcite scales, drifting gently to the sea floor, becoming ooze. Millions of years elapse, and then more millions.
Outrageous Cretaceous
Calcium Carbonate from Coccoliths, becoming ooze and eventually …. becoming chalk. Great slabs of vanilla chalk, rippling through this landscape.
Under your feet so very often, unseen.
The seafloor becomes the hill, the tussock, the downs.
Outrageous Cretaceous
And now…. Those bobbing hills, furred with green. Ancient monsters of the sea, The worlds they contain –
The Horseshoe Vetch Bird’s Foot Trefoil The Cowslip Common Eyebright
Wild Thyme
The Field Scabious Common Milkwort The Spider Orchid
Adonis Blue
The Silver Spotted Skipper Green Hairstreak
The Gatekeeper….
Outrageous Cretaceous Outrageous Cretaceous
