Dr Raewyn Martyn has shared the story of her latest artworks, Petrified Paintings, recently installed within the Grant Institute Cockburn Geological Museum as part of her IASH Fellowship. These public artworks will be accessible to view in person at the Museum, online, and in an associated publication as part of the IASH Occasional Papers series:
During my time as a Heritage Collections Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, I worked with the Cockburn collection of geological models and the University of Edinburgh Lyell Collection to look for examples of local experimental geology within the city and regionally.
This included looking at the early notebooks of geologists like Lyell, who have a relationship with geology that is grounded in their own personal and intimate relationships with childhood places and the land forms that they grew up within. This grounding in the personal and familial phenomenological experiences and relationships of place, sits in contrast with some of their later colonial and imperial scientific work.
...as I was walking around the city, I began thinking more deeply about the forms of anthropogenic geological processes that exist within the built environment and within sites of human habitation
I also learned about the work of Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin who has calcified objects within the karst systems in France and Ilana joined us for a panel discussion about anthropogenic tufa at IASH in April 2025. In February 2026, she has a restrospective exhibition opening at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, where you can see examples of her work with tufa [a form of limestone similar to travertine, It occurs naturally when calcium-rich water flows over soil and biological matter and interacts with carbon dioxide from the air, highlighting the interrelated nature of biological and geological processes. Anthropogenic tufa forms in post-industrial sites where calcium and other contaminants have leached into ground waters (Marta Kalabová, 2022; 2024)].
You can read all the documentation for her artworks on her website along with a range of images, and on the Athanor NOW site.
Both phases of Petrified Painting are part of Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW, a project by the Anna Polke Foundation. https://sigmar-polke-athanor-now.com/
The project team includes Dr Gillian McCay; Prof. Rachel Wood; Prof. Andrew Curtis; Dr Ian Butler; Dr Susan Cumberland (Leicester); and Dr Marta Kalabová (Strathclyde). Further research was undertaken in the UoE Special Collections with support from Pamela McIntyre and from IASH Deputy Director Dr Ben Fletcher-Watson. With support from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. Additional thanks to the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop for use of their studios in late 2024 and early 2025.