About

“But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

Understanding the scale & effect of time seems a difficult, if not impossible undertaking. There is something flatly stoical about geological time particularly – as we humans putter about, the earth simply gets on with things, regardless of the pock marks we leave behind. We scrape & pull & tear, poke & prod & provoke, continuously fishing for meaning, climbing some apparent ladder of understanding, seeking out a revelation of some kind of unity, some kind of statement that will annihilate the chaos and ease all frequencies to a zero point, smoothing space to an endless horizon…

Alchemical Reserve is an experiment in sharing & developing art making processes between artists Jessica Foley and Siobhán McDonald. This blog acts as a means for us to both share research, with each other & with a wider public, and to individually develop our own work and thoughts.