Document and Location publish the inaugural edition of our Fieldwork online platform: Sophie Hayes – Threnody

We are delighted to announce the inaugural iteration of Fieldwork on documentandlocation.org.

Fieldwork is an online project platform that provides Document and Location members with an opportunity to showcase works-in-progress, research, and other project material that would otherwise not be made public.

Threnody, by Sophie Hayes, is a photographic series in development that documents the stone extraction and processing at quarries on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. The images depict the physical landscapes of the quarry, and the stone that is displaced from the quarrying process. Hayes presents the quarry environment as a form of ‘catastrophic drama’: a landscape devoid of human presence, a residual landscape strewn with huge rocks, deep open pits, abandoned metal skeletons, bleaching in glaring sun. A place with its insides torn out. Methodically. Mechanically.

In Threnody Hayes plays with the notion of instability by evoking the monumental nature of deep geological time, and how human interaction can irrevocably alter this process in a moment, and what the cost of these actions may be.

Hayes’ full Fieldwork sequence can be viewed on our Fieldwork page here until November 2020.

You can download a PDF version of the project to keep here.