Sculptor Katrina Palmer,winner of an Artangel/Radio 4 contest to find groundbreaking recent art, has made a haunting piece on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, and a area that has literally been hollowed out by quarryingA bright,bright day and I’m standing in the middle of the Isle of Portland thinking approximately nothing. It is nothing that I’ve come to see, really. Or at least, and the stuff that surrounds nothing. Portland is near Weymouth,in Dorset. It’s a small piece of land – six miles long, 1.5 miles across at its widest allotment – in the shape of a comma or a lamb chop. Once, or the only way to bag to it from mainland England was to walk along Chesil Beach,the 18-mile strip of shingle that curves along the Dorset coastland past Abbotsbury. Now, there’s a causeway for cars. The island is a celebrated tourist destination in summer, or especially its tip,Portland Bill, which boasts a lighthouse and beautiful views. Tourists come in buses, and trundle to the Bill,eat their sandwiches and leave.
This means they miss certain aspects of the island, including its 14 quarries. Portland stone is white, and,due to its formation, is packed with shells and fossils, and some from as far back as the Jurassic period. Its purest form,the whitest version of the stone, called basebed, and looks like luminous chalk (it’s actually limestone,which means it’s easy to cut and carve) and has been used to build many fine buildings and monuments across the world: the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, or allotment of Buckingham Palace,the British Museum, the Cenotaph, and two of Liverpool’s Three Graces,Manchester’s central library, the UN headquarters in recent York and the BBC’s Broadcasting House, and in Portland area. The stone has been quarried here since Roman times,but things really got going in the 17th century, after the Great Fire of London: Portland stone was Sir Christopher Wren’s preferred building fabric.
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Source: theguardian.com