There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth

 Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks, 1869-70

 

 

Field Notes I : Scar

The shape of Robin Hood’s Bay is a result of the underlying rocks and the effects of erosion. The rocks are mostly mudstones, sandstones and sedimentary shales that were deposited some 200 million years ago. The Robin Hood’s Bay Dome was formed around 70 million years ago when earth movements pushed these layers of rock upwards. The platform in evidence today is all that remains of the dome. This planar sectional slice presents itself as a matrix of long, curved scaurs and ridges, reflecting the differing rates of erosion of the various shales. Above the Jurassic rocks lies a deep layer of till discarded 10,000 years ago by glacial shifts. The till is composed of silt particles, sand, gravel, pebbles and boulders, all bound together by red clay. As the lower sections of the sea cliffs retreat the overlying till loses its support resulting in landslip. The physical forces relentlessly transforming this place are complex. In 1974 L. A. Robinson* identified five key erosion processes at work:

  1. Micro-quarrying
  2. The expansion and contraction of clay mineral lattices by hydration and desiccation
  3. Wave-quarrying (the removal of small blocks from the cliff foot)
  4. Corrasion (the direct abrasion of the in-situ rock by wave-transported sediment)
  5. Wedging (small sediment particles forced into cracks in bedrock gradually forcing it apart)

These geomorphological influences have claimed 22m of coastline since 1895 and continue to do so at a rate of 0.3m per year, a rate that is set to accelerate with climate change. As the coastline retreats new geological features are continually revealed.

Time is inverted.

 

 

 

All images created between 21st and 22nd July 2018, Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire

REFERENCES

* L. A. Robinson (Towards a process-response model for cliffed coasts. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds) 1974

Agar, R.
Postglacial erosion of the North Yorkshire coast from the Tees estuary to Ravenscar
Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society (1960)

Robinson, L.A.
The morphology and development of the north-east Yorkshire shore platforms
Marine Geology, 23 (1977)

Sunamura, T.
Processes of sea cliff and platform erosion
In CRC Handbook of Coastal Processes and Erosion, CRC Press (1983)

Trenhaile, A.S.
The geometry of shore platforms in England and Wales
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 62 (1974)

Trenhaile, A.S. and Layzell, M.G.J.
Shore platform morphology and the tidal duration factor
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 6 (1981)

Selected images from Guy’s Scar series are shown below

ABOUT GUY DICKINSON

Born in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, Guy Dickinson trained as an Architect in London, winning the RIBA President’s Medal in 1993, and has been an associate at John Pawson since 2003. The seeds of his tracing silence project, established in 2011, were sown during a 14 day immersion in the Yorkshire Moors in 1992. Experimenting with methods of construction, weaving, stitching, thatching and casting, he created a series of simple shelters that sought to unearth the intrinsic nature of the places he inhabited.

Now utilising the mediums of photography and poetry, Guy’s work continues to explore place, but also the consonance between internal and external passage, the similitude between the passage of thoughts and the passage of the body. He scours, combs and sifts, eyes shifting from foreground to background, from details to horizons, looking to tease out some essence of how we perceive the world around us.

Recent work saunters from the sparse to the suffocating. Horizon, depth of field and perspective have been slowly relinquished in favour of texture, tone and surface. Developed through a cycling process of layering and distillation, these quietly cartographic fields invite us to look again at the landscape and the miry complexity of our place within it.

Website: tracingsilence.com
Twitter: @tracing_silence
Instagram: @tracing_silence

CREDITS

Unless otherwise stated, all words and images in this article are © Guy Dickinson

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