Emma Theresa Jude

I am a full-time working geologist. I have been painting alongside my professional practice for about 8 years, focusing on the unique ‘way of seeing’ that a genuinely scientific mode of looking at the landscape provides.  The majority of my material comes from my fieldwork, from Caithness to Oman and Iraq to Utah. I also run a nonprofit that ‘teaches art to scientists and science to artists’ through experimental drawing workshops in scientific organisations and museums. 

This exhibition centres around Variscan deformation structures – the folds, faults and altered rocks – in the Tor Bay area of Devon. The Variscan orogeny (‘mountain building event’) was a time in Earth history covering about 100 million years, from 380 to 280 million years ago. The continents of Laurussia and Gondwana collided together to form the last supercontinent, Pangaea. The mountains formed from this great crash were thrown up across Western Europe and North America.

In the UK, the great mountains have long since been washed away. The evidence for them remains, if you know where, and how, to look. This show is a love letter to my profession and calling – geology – and the thousand little signs we use to read a modern landscape and see deep time.