I picked up these two lovely fossils fragments yesterday from the beach at Marske.
This is a fragment of a large ammonite. The chambers within the ammonite have been mineralised, the sea has eroded the fossil along its suture lines.
This piece of limestone contains the fossilised remains of corals that lived on the bed of a warm sea during the Carboniferous period 325 million years ago.
This is the cloud that decided to shed its load on to us.
There are a number of plaques built into the path of the promenade along Redcar seafront. Each plaque is comprised of smaller plaques, which presumably represent different aspects of the town and coast.
This lovely plaque shows Ammonites, a fairly common fossil which occurs in the Jurassic rocks of the coast and are often found on the beaches from Staithes to Robin Hood’s Bay.
If I were to chose a fossil to represent Redcar, it would be Gryphea, known locally as Devil’s Toenails. Gryphea are the fossil remains of a member of the oyster family and are commonly found on the beaches from Redcar to Marske. Large fossil oyster beds can be easily seen at low tide on the mudstone scars that run from Redcar beach into the sea.
There are also ammonites to be found at Redcar, they are nowhere near as common as the Devil’s Toenails and they don’t frequently weather-out of the rocks as they do further down the coast. The specimens that I have seen in the oyster beds at Redcar are generally quite large, typically between 20-50 cm across.
Fossilised fragments of large Ammonites do occasionally wash up onto the Beach. I found the one below on Marske beach.
Redcar Rocks have official protection, the scars have been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Please do not try and cut any fossils out of the rocks, it’s possible to walk along the beach from Redcar to Marske and collect a pocketful of fossils, especially Devil’s Toenails, from the foreshore.
Near, at Huntly Nabb, the shore (which for a long way together has lain open) now rises into high rocks; and here and there, at the bottom of the rocks; lie great stones of several sizes so exactly form’d round by nature that one would think them bullets cast by some Artist for the great Guns. If you break them, you find, within, stony Serpents wreathed up in Circles, but generally without heads.
Camden’s Britannia 1586. Translation & edition of 1722 by Gibson
I’d just like to wish all my readers a very Happy New Year and thank you for taking the time to visit my blog. 2016 has been a pretty fruitful year for me, I started the year curating The Black Path exhibition at the House of Blah Blah gallery and finished the year with the release of the music from the project.
I’d like to thank all the people who have helped and inspired me throughout the year and look forward to continuing in 2017 where we will see the start of a new project and hopefully an exhibition in 2018.
All the best for 2017
Gavin
I wish you a merry Christmas,
And a happy New year,
A pantry of roast beef,
And a barrel of beer
*
Trad – Cleveland
Source W. Henderson 1879
Tonight is the New Year’s night, tomorrow is the day,
And we are come for our right and for our ray,
As we used to do in old King Henry’s day.
Sing fellows, sing Hagman heigh!
*
If you go to the bacon fitch, cut me a good bit,
Cut, cut and low, beware of your man;
Cut and cut round, beware of your thumb,
That I and my merry men may have some.
Sing fellows, sing Hagman heigh!
*
If you go to the black ark, bring me ten mark,
Ten mark, ten pound, throw it down upon the ground,
That I and my merry men may have some.
Sing fellows, sing Hagman heigh!
*
Trad – North Yorkshire
Source W. Henderson 1879
For the fourth year in a row, and rapidly becoming a Christmas tradition, Richard Sanderson has released a themed compilation of tracks on the wonderful Linear Obsessional label. The collection is described as The fourth of Linear Obsessional’s annual “Open Access” compilations of tracks exactly two minutes long. This time the theme was the human voice.
112 tracks from around the globe exploring all manner of approaches to the sounds of the “first instrument”
The collection is free to download and can be found here
Linear Obsessional is proud to release this compilation of pieces that almost accidently refer to the demise of the once great steel making tradition on Teesside, in the North East of England.
“The Black Path” was an exhibition held at the House of Blah Blah in Middlesbrough in January 2016. This CD is a recording of sounds, music and poetry from that exhibition.
The download includes a 24 page PDF booklet of notes, photographs from the exhibition, and an essay by Alistair Nixon.
released October 21, 2016
The Black Path is an ancient route. It has been many things: the northern boundary of an Anglian Kingdom, a medieval sailor’s trod, and a convenient path to work for the steelworkers of Middlesbrough.
The Black Path Project commenced in early 2015 as collaboration between Chris Whitehead and Gavin Parry, they soon realised that a number of other artists in the area had also created work based around the path. They then set about contacting artists and asking them if they would be willing to join the project with a goal of producing an exhibition. Once assembled, they approached the House of Blah Blah, who were very enthusiastic about the project and agreed to work with the group.
The goal of the project was to present a contemporary response to the Black Path, at the time no one could have predicted what events unfold over the following months in terms of the collapse of the steel industry. This project now has an added poignancy; it has accidentally captured the end of an era.
The exhibition and show features, field recordings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and music, all created as a response to the Black Path. The exhibition commences with a performance by two groups of musicians, Ammonites and Warped Freqs. both of who have written music especially for this occasion.
Pliny the Elder (d. 79 AD near Pompeii) called fossils of these animals ammonis cornua (“horns of Ammon”) because the Egyptian god Ammon (Amun) was typically depicted wearing ram’s horns
Continuing the geological theme from my previous post…
Last year, the wonderful Mr Chris Whitehead produced a rather beautiful piece entitled Gryphaea. Although Gryphaea is a product of Whitby, the bones of the land do not respect man-made borders.
When a sound artist picks up a particular subject in this case of geographical nature, he could envision two approaches: the more phonographic based and the more musique concrete based. On both scenarios the individual sensible experience of the artist, and the geographical phenomena in the artist’s consciousness are the motor behind the work, but the method, articulation and instrumentation on both scenarios are very different.
Based on what I can hear in “Gryphaea” it was constructed in three stances: the recording of the sounds, the processing/montage of those sounds and a third stance can be assumed when sine waves appear. The sonorities of ”Gryphaea” have this artificial / natural qualities that help establishing a more subjective and interpretation-based approach where textures and in general the tactile experience seem to be the formal core of the compositional work. The textures in ”Gryphaea” are crisp, grainy , sometimes harsh and percussive, and even subtle through the final piece “Peak fault”.
In contrast with the textural layer of sound that goes through the entire release, Chris Whitehead uses other elements like untreated field recordings, processed field recordings and sine waves that work in a background level giving to this work some very effective and beautiful sense of depth.
Overall this is a very interesting approach when it comes to site recording when we consider that the artist was working in a place where the past and the future coexist in a topographic sense, where you can feel the lapse of time literally imprinted in the layered depth of the ground. In this sense this work is very successful establishing a feedback between concept and instrumentation that efficiently works on the ever-fundamental poetical level.
Aside from all the sense that this work makes articulating concept and form, ”Gryphaea” is a release of strong beauty where the careful and meticulous work of the artist pays off revealing to the listener a very strong tactile and immersive experience.
-John McEnroe (Field Reporter) http://thefieldreporter.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/89/
Gryphaea can be purchased from the Obs label
The Smell of Water 