Stories of the Land

Stories of the Land (audio and transcript)

"Emma explores themes of the natural, temporal and spiritual from a queer perspective. In these pieces they reflect on the divine properties of natural 'things', like rocks, and how they might help us imagine new queer worlds, and new queer selfhoods, that are more rooted in natural notions of time and change. In doing so, Plover encourages us to forget what we think we know about natural or rural spaces, and instead learn from them. Emma’s installation and zine give us a blueprint for imagining and feeling otherwise, for getting lost.

The Shropshire Rocks they offer up to the viewer are found objects, transported away from the fields in which Plover found them. These quartz pieces have been broken apart or ‘revealed’ by the plough. The Stiperstones by contrast, a particular rock formation in Shropshire, aren’t found objects, but through Plover’s zine one is returned home by them. Images of the landscape, and the musings or missives offered up in Plover’s Stories of the Land work to minimise the human, gesturing towards the enormity of geologic or natural time against the shortness of any personal encounter with nature."