memory cairns

Linking locations, species, community and memory through sculpture and drawing.

‘Memory Cairns’ is a biodiversity project linking species memory, community and culture through drawing.  Launched in 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, 'Memory Cairns' aims to bring awareness of locally endangered species through the activity of drawing to a community, creating connections between people, locations and species.

Engaging a local community, young and old, in the activity of drawing focusing on locally endangered species, will help to bring awareness of the fragility of a species, to a community.

There are no deadlines or conclusions to this project, its aims are ongoing, to expand the awareness of the fragility of a local environment by a community through the activity of drawing. By employing the same format and principles of each project globally, and sharing the drawings produced through this website will bring communities together, a shared experience spanning time zones, cultures and ecologies.

How will this be achieved?

The project will identify a particular location where a know species of fauna and/or flora is endangered within that region. Once an area and species has been identified, a temporary, site-specific sculptural cairn will be produced by the artist Oliver Reed. Small and intimate in scale, employing locally sourced wood and placed within a natural environmental context each cairn will become an ephemeral structure marking the landscape.  Small and fragile these isolated form will remain exposed to the elements, a focal point, offering the viewer a unique, personal and cultural response through their engagement to the sculptures shape, placement and environmental conditions, a sense of space, place and the marking of time. Like the species they evoke, the timbers will metaphorically 'die' if not protected and cared for, rotting, decomposing and collapsing as they respond to the elements.

These disintegrating forms then become the core of ‘Living Cairns’, shielded and protected by a natural ‘skin’ of materials such as, stone, clay or turf gathered from the immediate environment. Once protected the sculptures will then be left for a period of one day, a life span, based on the time it takes for the earth to rotate once. After this period the ‘Living Cairn’ will be set alight and burnt, creating the effect of a smoking cairn or ‘earth kiln’. As the water and other constituents are burnt from the wood leaving behind the charcoal, the cairn kiln will shrink, allowing the ‘skin’ to collapse in on itself creating a memorial or ‘Memory Cairn’. This spontaneous and natural rearrangement of the carefully collected durable materials, will symbolically, preserve the 'memory' of the vanished wooden, signifying the dwindling lose of a local species.

The charcoal resulting from the cairn will be collected and used as a symbolic and primary medium in workshops and artist-led activities engaging a local community in the making their own memory drawings based on the locally endangered species. This will enable direct parallels to be drawn between the contrived loss of the sculptural cairn and the potential threat and loss of a locally known species, resulting in heightened awareness of the need to protect fragile and specific bio-diversities before they are lost forever.

Photographic and film records plotting the sites and displaying the resulting drawings on this website along with physical remnants of the ‘Memory Cairns’ will remain as ephemeral markers, these will build in a network dotted around the globe, charting past events and offering natural reminders of a project designed to create moments of hope for vanishing species. Linking communities’ together, connecting people, species, memories and drawings, bringing an awareness of the fragility of the planet from a local to a global community.

Oliver Reed