ABIGAIL REYNOLDS
CORE
9-9 Novemeber, 2024
After a two-year renovation project, Auction House is delighted to return home to the Buttermarket in Redruth and open with CORE by Abigail Reynolds. A continuation of a work first made for Flamm Festival in Redruth a year ago and features A Book of Holes, a new film work that will be followed on Saturday night by a CORE Clubnight featuring the original CORE mix alongside an array of DJ’s.
A BOOK OF HOLES
This 12-minute three-screen video, is a collage of many kinds of footage that create a constellation of references. The soundtrack is entirely composed of sounds recorded in the now abandoned Holman Quarry in Redruth, above Lanner. This is a work in progress, an enquiry into how many connections can be kept spinning in the mind.
Characters:
Trilobites: marine animals that we know only as fossils. Some evolved compound eyes with crystal lenses. They lived for 270 million years. Trilobites became extinct over 248 million years before humans evolved (2.8 million years ago), but like us they were highly social, could see, and felt emotion*.
Horseshoe crabs: the closest living relative of trilobites, and have now survived for 445 million years, but are threatened with extinction because since the 1960’s humans have extracted the blood of wild horseshoe crabs to check for contaminants in vaccines, on which we rely. Their blood is blue because it is rich with copper.
Copper mines: Mining began in Cornwall around 2150 BC. Cornish mines are known for the extraction of tin, but copper is more abundant*. Water runs through the now abandoned mines and leaches out the copper, turning the granite walls blue.
Holman Quarry: A site above Lanner near Redruth used to test percussive rock drills before export, probably from 1954 to 1968 (though records are lost). Drill steels from 6ft to 16ft long are used to set dynamite deep into the granite for blasting.
EDM: In the late 1980’s the closure of industry (mining in Cornwall and textiles in Manchester for example) coincided in the rise of EDM to the mainstream and the emergence of rave culture. In Cornwall, the sound of mining was replaced by dance beats.
With grateful thanks to:
Liam Jolly, Stuart Blackmore, Vanessa Backus, Chloe Eathorne, Oliver Smith, Tonia Liu, Amy Morgan, Georgina Umney, Neil Rose, Toby Sadgrove, Ben James, Martin Pease, Alex Kearney, Duncan Murdoch and Ross Anderson at OUNHM, Phil Reynolds at South Crofty, Marissa Keating, Otis and Orla Harper, Morgan Ansell, Nathan Henton, and many others who have helped me with this extended research since 2015 - Abigail Reynolds
Abigail Reynolds
Biography
Reynolds is interested in edges, duality, and time. Her interest takes many forms, like gilding the sunlight falling onto a wall at a particular calendar moment, connecting the intensely present moment of moving sunlight to the deep history of time. Or she might take two book plates showing the same monument, but photographed in different years, and cut them into a time-ruffle. She sometimes creates work with the wider community involvement – like library reading groups or brass bands. She has made sheets of glass from the sand and seaweed of a single beach. She explores in many directions, like an archaeologist she lifts layers of time into the light.
Abigail Reynolds lives in St Just, Cornwall, and has a studio at Porthmeor in St Ives. She studied English Literature at St Catherine’s College Oxford University and subsequently Fine Art at MA level at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Over 2021-22 Reynolds exhibited across all four cities of the British Art Show 9 tour. In 2020 she received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. Her work can be found in major collections, including the Arts Council Collection, and the Government Art Collection. Her recent sculpture ‘Trilobite’ will be at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2025-2028.Her commission of a window for the library at Kresen Kernow, the Cornish archive centre was installed in 2022.In 2016 Reynolds was awarded the BMW Art Journey prize at Art Basel, to travel to lost libraries along the Silk Road. Her book ‘Lost Libraries’ documenting this journey was published by Hatje Cantz in 2018.
For more details visit www.abigailreynolds.com
