Splitting DIstance

Sarah Kernohan’s photographs of flint found on the eastern shores of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (Unama’ki), are the starting point for a new series of collages that explore this stone’s potential to transmit information about the land it has come from and where it is now found.

Splitting Distance features a series of photographic collages that transmit icy surfaces, tumultuous waters, rocky shores, and portals. This flint originated from the shores of France or the United Kingdom and is now found in Glace Bay, whose namesake was coined by French settlers, who named the location “Baie de Glace” (Bay of Ice). The chalky surface of the flint gives way to semi-translucent surfaces with reflective flecks and shards, similar to the textures and patterns found in ice and light bouncing off of water.

Fragments of flint nodules have been found near these former colonial harbours, where people used them as materials in tools and as fire starters. Archaeologists have reassembled these discrete parts found at former homesteads into whole rocks. Similarly, these collages are assembled with fragments that connect different surfaces. They line up coherently in some parts and give way to aberrations in others, collapsing scale and drawing the rocks closer to the other landscape elements. The collages allude to the watery surfaces the flint travelled across centuries ago.

Splitting Distance builds on the artist’s formal interest in rocks and the narrative potential of geology, the description of landscapes, their formation, and their capacity to provide an understanding of their duration, scale, and geographic spread. Here, these geological narratives give way to a story of settlement, trade and the other means by which these rocks travel—large deposits of ballast are found in ports frequented by colonists across the Eastern shores of North America—splitting these narratives apart and offering a way for the artist to explore her connection to this location, where she has seasonally relocated as a teaching artist for nearly a decade, and a disconnected relationship with the European continent where her family migrated from.

Thanks to the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, Pat the Dog, and the Exhibition Assistance Program at the Ontario Arts Council for their financial support of this work. Special thanks to the Cape Breton Fossil Centre for their logistical support of this project.