Julie Upmeyer

VOID FRACTION

is an ongoing collaboration between artists Mari Rose Pritchard and Julie Upmeyer, following limestone through landscapes, quarries, buildings, histories and imagined futures. Through sculpture, installation, performance, moving image, text and language, they use limestone as both material and lens: a way of moving between geological and human timescales, considering how extraction, labour, care, destruction and transformation become embedded in the material world.

Their projects emerge through sustained encounters with particular places, tracing connections between deep time, contemporary actions and the geological futures we are already helping to create.

Void Fraction projects (So far)

This all began with a seemingly simple line of inquiry - we were researching the permeability (both physically and conceptually) of Caernarfon Castle’s limestone walls. Drawn to a local source for limestone, we visited Aber Quarry. On our very first visit, we encountered not only the cavernous quarry but its many by-products - limestone powder an aqueous, semi-solid and almost rock-like state. Poured, it formed an opaque milky pool, piled high it became towering white mountains. We were instantly transfixed by the other-worldliness of this altered quarry landscape. One discovery led to the next. Our fascination has only intensified. This is whats happened so far.

The Quarry

During our frequent visits to Aber Quarry on Anglesey, we dove deeply into the depths of aqueous limestone dust, delving into its transformative powers. Exploring the physical qualities of limestone in this unique state, we dug, sifted, filled, replicated, excavated, measured, cast, eroded, displaced, dehydrated and dissolved this mysterious, yet ubiquitous substance.

“it seems to repel the water almost on a cellular level, it seems to sweat, pushing it out to the surface as it is compressed”

“while drying, it wants to reform itself into rock-like striations,  layering and splitting apart in smooth planes”