Many Shades of Gray

Many Shades of Gray takes place along the Carrick coast inspired by Elizabeth Anderson Gray (1831–1924), one of Scotland’s geologist. Working at a time when women were excluded from scientific societies, Gray spent decades walking these shores in long skirts and sturdy boots, collecting fossils that helped shape understanding of the region’s 450-million-year-old strata. Much of her contribution remained overshadowed in her lifetime.

Walking sections of the same coastline today, I follow Gray’s spirit of fieldwork — though my long skirt is made of Gore-Tex rather than Victorian wool. Instead of searching primarily for ancient fossils, I am gathering what lies at our feet now: colourful remnants of fossil-fuel culture. Materials that may one day form a new geological layer — the trace of our own age, a possible “Plastocene”.

By placing Gray’s deep-time discoveries alongside the debris of the present, the project asks how future geologists might read our era in 450 million years. What will remain? And what stories will our materials tell?