Tors happy to help – gravity is less over granite

Since the 20th century, sculptural practice and the artwork’s making have been expanded upon by mediums such as video often engaging with the physical actions associated with material and the artist’s body. More recently, New Materialist thinking has acknowledged the autonomous agency of materials in and of themselves. This artwork asks how video can reveal the possible compulsion and gravitational forces of large granite tors from Black Hill on the lands of the Taungurung people, Kyneton. The real-time video of the tors, showing the subtle movement of wind in the trees and butterflies moving in and out of frame, seemingly traces the tors desire to roll independently from their precariously perched state. Each tor rotates as if autonomously around the screen’s frame and as the boulder tilts to roll, in combination with the angled projection screens and in relation to the other two boulder’s movement, a felt haptic affect of instability occurs in the viewers’ body - questioning notions of gravity, time and the physiological sense of stability, our underlying assumptions of what holds things together.