Glossaries For Forwardness

The Museum Building is renowned for the distinctive materials employed in its construction. Our design for the exhibition identity references both the emphasis placed on materials in the building's design and the Geology and Geography departments housed within the building. Inspired by the process used to design the building, we allowed the materials we worked with to decide the design outcome. For example, at points in this publication, type is printed on the opposite side of the page it is seen. This is a way of incorporating the paper (and its transparent nature) as a design element in and of itself. For the signage, we avoided traditional printing techniques. Instead we laser cut our design directly into the wood used to construct the sandwich board. Alongside this, we drew on research into the era the Museum Building was constructed. We were interested in the marbling used for the end pages of books designed during that time. Marbling appealed to us as a piece of contemporaneous 'graphic design' that references geology, in how it looks and its name. We created traditional marbled patterns using iron gall ink (a type of ink popular at that time). The digital applications required a digital solution - for these we created animated artificial marbling in a 3D program that recreated the effect of ink in water. These elements were then layered on top of each to reference geological layering. The grid used to lay out our designs is the same proportions of the pattern of distinctive tiles on the floor of the Museum Building. We used an updated cut of Caslon as the primary typeface. Caslon was associated with private presses linked with the early Arts and Craft movement whose theories helped inspire the architects of the Museum Building in their approach.

Glossaries for Forwardness arose from Marie Farrington’s artist residency at Trinity Centre for the Environment (2021-22) where her research approached geological sampling methods as ways to explore our interpretation of landscape, and how land can be implicit in its own representation and display. In short, a central theme of the work was responses to materiality. In light of this, we produced exhibition ephemera which engaged with the medium it was presented within. We took advantage of papers translucency for example.
Glossaries for Forwardness presents site-responsive works installed throughout the foyer of the Museum Building. Sculptural and textile interventions present an extensive material glossary that reference the building’s interior, repurposing geological sampling methods such as thin-sectioning, microscopic imaging and resin-mounting into modes of making in the studio. In collaboration with Stanislaw Welbel, a spatial audio installation emanates from the ventilation shafts, composed on a synthesiser by translating the building’s various stones into a strata of layered sound. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Dr. Quentin Crowley, Anneka French and Marie Farrington, and a public engagement programme including talks, screenings, listening sessions and an event in collaboration with the Department of Ultimology.

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