The premise of these two videos is simple, spontaneous and experiential – much in accordance with my previous video-based work. It is an act of Sisyphean futility: carrying one rock up its neighbouring hill and vice versa – the arduous task apparently only to exhaust myself. Such efforts are reminiscent of worshipful acts – the experience is in its own right religious, harking back to sacred pagan spirituality and reverent connection to the earth and one’s own landscape, a reference made only more boldly by my passing through the ruins of the Bronze Age settlement of Grimspound that lies between the two hills. This is a reference to time, the passing of it, and the absurdity of doing. Here are two rocks, displaced after unfathomable time, after an entire culture has been and gone between them. The duality of this work (the two rocks, the two hills, the two TV monitors facing each other) reflects not only the rocks and the hills in communication with each other, but also the communication between the two worlds of geological time and human time. Grimspound, the circle of stones between the two hills, and the unseen act of my carrying the rocks up the hills, act as a reflection on the humanness of past and present, fraught with futility in its ephemeral nature. But, here the rocks remain, as they always have. This is a conversation between the land and man… a conversation across ages.

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