Collecting Mountains is a multidisciplinary installation created for EARTH: Four Elements exhibition at The Creative Space. The project included sound, photography, ceramics, plants, books relating to mountains, topographical maps of mountainous areas, domestic furniture, bricks and volcanic rocks. The sound element was a soothing Mountain Meditation repeated continuously. It was created by Wendy Wood, University of Derby, presented as part of a nursing workshop on compassion focussed therapy.  

Collecting Mountains reflects upon our complex and contradictory interrelationship with geology and our passive observations of the altered ecologies of the earths surface as we go about our day to day lives.   The work investigates mountains as a cultural construct upon which we project our desires for conquest, escape from the everyday, for spiritual fulfilment, our thirst for exploration and aspirational dreams. They fulfil key physical and psychological human needs yet we transform them irrevocably via land acquisition, large scale landscaping, mining and architectural interventions.  

The installation explores clay as an earth resource transformed by human action and draws upon ceramic decorative traditions of display in a domestic context, as passive background to our everyday experiences.  

Collecting Mountains asks how we might re-imagine our future relationship with the earths surface and considers how we may evolve into a sustaining species through reflection and thoughtful action.