ONE ISLAND MANY VISIONS - Portland Quarry

Royal Society Of Sculptors for Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust - September 2025
‘One Island – Many Visions’ exhibition aims to ask questions about art and landscape, landscape and environment, and how artwork sits within this both creatively, and scientifically bringing together an interdisciplinary model of artistic practice. Pertinent to this approach it will provoke discussions about sustainability and climate change.

This collaboration between the Royal Society of Sculptors and PSQT, co-curated by Dr Kate Parsons and Hannah Sofaer, respectively, encouraged the artists involved to create new work responding to the context of the local environment on Portland and Tout Quarry in particular; now a triple SSSI Nature Reserve and conservation area. Some of these themes relate to life cycles, mortality, mapping the landscape and how this changes, loss of habitat, recycling and use of ethical materials, origins of the English landscape and the artistic and scientific legacy going forward.

Anna is showing three pieces – Time Worn, Passing Through and Strange Finds.

Time Worn and Passing Through were made in response to Tout Quarry on Portland Bill as part of an exhibition resulting from a collaboration between the Portland Sculpture Quarry Trust and the Royal Society of Sculptors.

The wall-based work Time Worn is as much landscape as ‘figure’, and contrasts human time with deep geological time, as well as the fragility of weathered plaster with the permanence of stone. This piece also plays with and undermines traditional parallels made between landscape and the female form. It represents the ‘ageing’ body as beautiful.

Passing Through is a site specific in the quarry itself calling both to the contrast between rock and plaster, body and stone – but also their visual similarities. This sculptural installation is activated by the changing light throughout the day, and, like the rock itself, it darkens in the wet. It appears to be a mix of human, rock and animal, and yet is strangely ‘other’. The hands call out, from the skyline in particular, as a reminder of the human hands that worked the quarry and shaped the landscape, and as a tribute to makers in general including the group of exhibiting sculptors.

Both pieces, and the smaller Strange Finds fossil-like objects, are constructed from sections of life casts of the sculptor members of the group. First shown in Chichester Cathedral, with the same artists, that work Fuse has now been deconstructed to form these new works.

A fourth work in this series, Trace, was shown at the RWA at the same time as the One Islands – Many Visions exhibition in Portland.