To belong is to have a place – to be located, situated, included, to be part of. The erratic boulder is temporarily held within a glaciated environment until moved by the action of gravity and deposited elsewhere. It is a material mass carried in and out of unsettled and mobile spaces. The erratic object neither belongs physically to its origin nor geologically in its new location. It is missing from the mountain movement that created it, and found in the gravitational situation that receives it. This formation of geomorphic activity simultaneously had a place, has a place and is a place. The erratic then is a behaviour found in an action, a performance, and circumstance of motion; and, a quality located in an object subject to forces.
To gather is the work of social geography. To separate is the work of archaeology. To be in a place and out of place is the work of an archive. The repository of the Earth is contained in its arrangement and rearrangement of objects under assorted classifications. This loaded information directs us in the reading of environments we are working in. But what happens when we discover something is not where we would expect to find it? – an entity out of place that also retains a record of its history? The acts of archaeological discovery contain discarded geology – supporting material (debris) is brushed aside in favour of revealing artefacts. A preserved object is held with the hand in the present. This remnant of cultures passed, the remains and fragments (synonyms of debris), become destined for interpretation. It is only through speculative constructions that the once-was can be assigned a past so that it may now acquire a future.
To be lost is the work of weather. The ruin holds in it all that it has been subject to. The collapse is as much its present condition, as its past and future shape. When rock formed mountain ranges and weather interrupted its mass, the detritus of large-scale energetic events found itself loosed and lost to the whole – an assemblage of forms. To notice a thing missing is to feel a gap, an interval, to recognise an absence. To find an interstice in a vast aggregation of material is to reimagine the inner life of a boulder displaced.
Luce Choules 