A Modern Lapidary

The title of this work A Modern Lapidary makes reference to Medieval Books of Stones in which stones, imagined and real, are catalogued in relation to their physical, magical and medical properties.  Animated mid-century scientific photographs of minerals are back projected through one of the display cases in the Whewell Mineral Gallery, altering our perception of the samples within so that we encounter them as entities, rather than as specimens.  Such displays – together with the rest of the collection – operate as part of a system in which Geological study of the Earth is positioned as neutral and objective, instead A Modern Lapidary and An Extractive Index seek to situate it / them within a set of complex socio-ecological power relations.