Kaori Homma's Meridian Stone Project
Stonecarver Iain Cotton, in Bath, UK carved the meridian rock, and is also the first contributor. He writes;
I was thinking about scale and placement. Where is this stone’s prime meridian? What are the right coordinates for these zero’s? How big should their footprint be? I was thinking about ellipses within ellipses, and figure/ground relationships, and little upside down right angled triangles connecting time and space. I was thinking about the clockwise and counter clockwise orbits of 3 mm of sharp tungsten. The rhythm of hammer on chisel. Breathing and being precise. I was thinking about hours, minutes and seconds. Not thinking about the time but remembering to count it. Carving time from my other deadline. |
Kaori Homma's Meridian Stone Project marries her Homma Meridian Project to Street Road Rocks in an ongoing collaborative project, involving international artists from various places: a stone taken from Street Road, and carved with the longitudinal coordinate of the Greenwich Prime Meridian (0º0’0’’) is being mailed around the world, from artist to artist. Each artist participant photographs the stone, in a location geographically important to them, adding a personal narrative about place.
Japanese-born, London-based Homma investigates our understanding of place, history-both personal and social- and the instances in which the two intersect. “As with the Greenwich Prime Meridian Line, boundaries and demarcations are necessarily a means of orientating ourselves within the increasingly multi-cultural, multi-ethnic social context we face in this shrinking world”, writes the artist about Homma Meridian. “However, at the same time these demarcations and boundaries also create tensions and barriers. The idea behind the “Homma Meridian” project is to draw an imaginary line which points to the North and South Pole in a specific location, using ephemeral material, which the artist suggests is a substitute for the “Prime Meridian”. The project highlights the “imaginary” nature of the boundaries that exist in our mind and questions the perception of our position on the earth as it spins on the titled axis eastwards, always spinning away from the west." For Meridian Stone Project, Homma poses this question to artists-recipients: “Prime Meridian is set in Greenwich, and indicates where the West begins and East ends, but you were asked to make a transportable version. What did you think about that while you are working on this stone?” Artists from far corners of the planet respond in both images and words, creating personal meditations on place. |
