SOLID. a letter to the banded iron formation [part I]
the next letter, from 2020
This is the first part of the next letter from THE LAY OF THE LAND, THE SWELL OF THE SEA, my MA Sculpture dissertation from 2020.
It’s the first of two main sections in the piece, and is written to a big piece of polished iron oxide which sits in the Natural History Museum, London. Next time you’re there, go and say hi to it. It’s a beautiful thing, and a very good friend of mine.
SOLID is a bit of a longie so I’m going to send it to you in three parts, but in quick succession over the next couple of days so you don’t lose the thread of it.. hopefully!
As always you can find the whole of my dissertation here if you want to read the whole thing at once.
SOLID
to the banded iron formation [part I]
I’m imagining you sitting in the dark of the Natural History Museum (Fig. 1), your 2.6 tonnes pressing down onto your reinforced bit of floor in an alcove of the Hintze Hall.1 No-one is coming to see you right now, because the world is a state of stay-at-home, everything is closed, everything is cancelled2, and the pages of the NHM website have taken on a new burden of simulation. They’re not just there to entice the viewer, they’re now there as a direct substitute for a physical visit. People can explore the museum’s collection through their laptop or phone. I feel lucky that I managed to visit you in person before all this happened. Although I still feel that your presence in that space is odd, as you were pulled from the Earth in Australia, cut, polished and transported to London3, and therefore my experience of you is a far cry from your origins. And yet, I think the sense of wonder I feel when I look at your banded layers, your majestic presence in that grand hall, the attention you command; all of these acting together coax me towards a consideration of your story.
You represent a very specific and important episode in the Earth’s life story, known as the Great Oxygenation Event. It started in the Archaean with Cyanobacteria.4 Even the names get me excited! Beautiful, mysterious words I can romanticise and dream about. A mass of blue-green organisms, multiplying in an atmosphere hitherto devoid of oxygen, using a new kind of energy production: photosynthesis. Chains of cells absorbing sunlight through the murky waters of the sea, vitalising, soft technology fizzing, suspended, light-feeding microscopic greenery to which we arguably owe our very existence.
The way you formed, along with all the others of your kind, was a slow-moving chain of events. The name implies an instantaneous happening. We can imagine a flourish of green, a bloom of life into a metallic soup, a sudden cleansing of murky waters and a burst of life-giving oxygen into the atmosphere.
But this sequence happened over the course of 2 billion years.5 Earth-time is slow. Lifetimes upon lifetimes are spent in gradual progress, creeping movement, patient growth.
It was while the supercontinents of the Archaean Aeon bumped against each other over millions of years, causing great seas and mountains to appear and disappear, that this blooming of life was occuring. In fact, scientists have hypothesised that it was this particular series of tectonic movements at specific points during the Archaean, which caused the right mix of minerals and nutrients to tumble into the oceans from gigantic swathes of eroding mountain range. They say this provided the conditions for the series of verdant eruptions which exhaled oxygen into the gloomy depths.6
The water, rich with iron, was inundated with these new bacteria, and the oxygen they were producing needed to go somewhere. The oxygen attracted and joined with the iron, producing iron oxide which, no longer water-soluble, drifted slowly to the ocean floor. As these iron oxide sediments were laid, your layers were forming. Variations in colour and thickness appear amongst each sheet, laid atop the last as a sprinkle of dust through water, a slow dance, a drift of particulates at the mercy of gravity with only liquid resistance slowing their gentle descent.
Formations like you have been found the world over; actually, the main reason you were brought to the Museum and not processed for ore and used in industry is because your iron content just wasn’t quite high enough.7 That makes you sound like you are in some way inferior; admittedly maybe in that specific context, but in all others, you and I both know that just isn’t the case. You have been recognised as an impressive example of your kind, both in size and looks. To me, though, you are more. You have captivated me so intensely because your mass, your pattern, your tactile surface, your monolithic sculptural presence… They represent to me something about time. I can see time in your layers. You are a static, mighty lump, and yet when I learned of your origins I could immediately visualise the delicate way in which your strata were first laid. Your polished sides, where these layers have been bisected, show millions of years of gentle progress, but in an almost pictorial sense, they are now motionless, captured like a wedding flower in a resin cube, a tactile, mute, frozen object which now serves as a relic of a momentous time period.
You see, the Great Oxygenation Event had a beginning, but it also had an end. The PLAY button was hit as the Cyanobacteria began to multiply. The building process for your great mass was set in motion. There came a point at which all the iron in the sea had been oxidised, and the oxygen produced by all this photosynthesis could go nowhere, except... up.8 Up through the now crystal clear waters and out into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it allowed complex life to flourish. The STOP button was only pressed once oxygen levels in the atmosphere plateaued; the process was complete. The performance was finished, and here you stand as the product, the artefact... and the rest, as they say, is history.
But like a relic from a performance, you do not show the actual spectacle which took place. You were made in the process, but however beautiful or valuable you might be, you only amount to an abstract representation of what took place. In objecthood, you are not what one might consider a true ‘document’, like a video recording or a straight-laced nuts-and-bolts verbal description. I think you are a special kind of document. When Kathleen Jamie writes about a soot stain on the wall of a Spanish cave, made by a fire which was extinguished thousands of years ago, the carbon smudge having calcified in years of lying untouched, I understand what she means when she says ‘It makes [her] neck creep’.9 Seeing the mark of an action, whether human or not, can be such a powerful way to understand and imagine how it came to be. Tangible, tactile objects and signs are hypnotising, they spark a physical reaction. I feel these memories in my body; if I touch you, I am touching a process, I am touching millions of years at a time, I am folding the present back on itself to touch a time which is beyond my comprehension.
⬟⯂⬟
Kerry Lotzof, ‘The heavy metal rock bands charting life on early Earth’, in Collections (2017) <https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-heavy-metal-rock-bands-charting-life-on-early-earth.html> [accessed 12 February 2020] para. 1 of 20.
See: <https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-23-march-2020> At time of writing this section, the UK was at the start of the so-called ‘lockdown’ period, a set of measures imposed by Government in response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020. As part of this, all non-essential venues and businesses were ordered to close until further notice, which included galleries and museums, however many had already taken the decision to close before this time.
Ibid. para. 18 of 20.
Georgia Hepburn, ‘The Great Oxygenation Event – when Earth took its first breath’, in Scientific Scribbles (2017) <https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2017/10/22/the-great-oxygenation-event-when-earth-took-its-first-breath/> [accessed 14 April 2020] para. 6 of 16.
Ibid. para. 3 of 16.
Ian H Campell, Charlotte M Allen, ‘Formation of supercontinents linked to increases in atmospheric oxygen’ in Nature Geoscience 1(8) (2008), 554-558.
Ibid. para. 19 of 20.
Ibid. para. 6 of 20.
Kathleen Jamie ‘La Cueva’, in Sightlines (London: Sort Of Books, 2012), pp. 164-171 (p.167).