Patrick Farmer
+447769732635
patrickwilliamfarmer@gmail.com
Dirt Work (excerpt)
I’ve been thinking about outside to outline as magnetic field, poles rendering themselves opposite, and yet, polarities flip.
We begin with outline and then move outside of outline which in turn creates an inside of outside, perceiving all this as both part and whole.
Earth’s magnetic field has flipped many times during the last half a billion years, leaving a geomagnetic record in igneous rocks bearing magnetic minerals, and in ocean floor sediments.
Dirt work is akin to getting your hands in Earth’s thymus gland, memories of wilderness perhaps, where we can learn to read patterns, breathe with intermediary voices, fossilised magnetic fields, and scar lines, who palaeontologists once called great dyings.
We can picture magnetic particles in molten rock moving and aligning themselves with prevailing magnetic field, as rock cools they are frozen in place, just as magnetic particles, settling on ocean floor, reflect field orientation in time, gifting us magnetic chronologies.
Bio-electromagnetic fields are more than sum of their parts, we might imagine all life on earth as a layer of receptive jelly, spread thinly over Earth’s crust, field, invisible sphere, rising and falling like spume, inscribed with a tracery of all thoughts and emotions of all life.