Water flowed through solid walls. A ghost, carrying with it flecks of dust.

Sediment landed, tiny particles finding their way into every crevice, every pocket, every pore.

As the earth churned, two towers of steam rose into the sky to meet the clouds.

The wildflowers of the summer before had been replaced with a house – or the shadow of where a house once was.

Memories became dislocated. Hazy.

On a clear day the two white plumes were like giant obelisks, orienting and directing the activity below.

Holes being dug in a slight depression quickly filled with water; a moment on repeat.

Without timber beams to support the walls, the clay crumbled in on itself. Feet sunk into a muddy bog.

Strata blew through the ground, echoing as it went.

Back in the warehouse surfaces are thickened by hand, mixing with air, before dissolving and spreading out.

Deposits from the well spill over.

Stories are told, and untold, and retold.

I say well, but I don’t mean well. I mean, I mean well, but not in present tense. Or not tensed at all.

Each page a capture of marks, cracked, bloated and dry. The cracks widen, like mouths, opening up to reveal, not words but a kind of buzzing.

Sheets scatter, residue of a past that was told and discarded.

Layers are restaged and redistributed.

Built on the last, compressing and impressing and complicating.

Traces traced.

Joins snap when lifted, fracturing connections.

Dirt embedded in fingertips.

The well replaces itself with its own metaphor;

a fountain of knowledge.

Fragmented gestures collected and contained.

Tool-marks collide.

A trowel scrapes away grains of sand from the timber.

Whispers drift on the edge.

Hands reach for wayfinders, hooks to hang understandings.

And Murmured was developed during a sustained research trip at Landesamt für Archäologie Sachsen (Archaeological Heritage Office, Saxony), conducting fieldwork at excavation sites in Großstolpen and Droßdorf, where a collection of Linearbandkeramik (LBK) water wells from the Early Neolithic are being dug up. It is a collection of A4 ceramic sheets, made from clay gathered and fired onsite at the lignite mine in Droßdorf, before being installed at the base of the well excavation in Großstolpen. And Murmured engages excavation sites in Droßdorf and Großstolpen as networks of repetitions; repeated encounters through digging leading to a reordering of material histories, in the creation of singular moments of analysis.

Many thanks to: Bianca Hester, Mikala Dwyer, Harald Stäuble, Rengert Elburg, Thomas Reuter, Maria Cladders, Sabine Wolfram, Saskia Kretschmer, Frank Schell, Bernhard Muigg, Willy Tegel, Christoph Herbig, Wulf Hein, Jacqui Shelton, Laura Carthew, Kenzee Patterson, Clare Britton, and Alison Brookes. Thanks also to Landesamt für Archäologie Sachsen.