Great Geological Controversies, Third Edition (Zine #1)
By Ruth Allen
‘Great Geological Controversies, Third Edition’ is my first collaged-content, 28-page zine available now in a beautifully printed limited edition of 100.
Inspired by a source text book of the same title published by Professor A Hallam in 1982, my edition is a response to the original by way of erasure poetry, original poetry, photography and other thought fragments created especially for this art project. The original text explores various core and historic ‘controversies’ in the study of geology (such as how rocks are created) and was published in the year I was born, by faculty staff at the university where I would complete my geology undergraduate degree twenty years after, which is itself twenty years ago now.
What started as a curiosity reading project, grew into a collection of erasure poems taken from the first page of each chapter of the original book. In these, I explore the idea of ‘the missing voice’, often drawing out new perspectives that seem to me to be missing from the original pages. Voices that contradict or ask is this really how things are?
I then supplemented these with my own original poems, some written first in 2008 (lightly edited in 2024) when I completed my geology PhD and inspired by fieldwork and trips I had taken; things I had seen that scared or worried me. Excavating them from my own ‘archives’ I felt they had an interesting resonance to this current project that loosely responds to the extractive, exclusionary controversies in the ‘discipline’ of geology today, and more broadly in our current burn-out culture.
The finished collection doesn’t pretend to any answers, but offers some insight into my creative process and thought-development, again bringing the planetary and human experience into conversation.
Great Geological Controversies (GGC) is a self-initiated curiosity project between longer book projects. After publishing my second book Weathering, I wanted to spend some time making something of my own again - with full control over production, design and content. This is where my writing started many years ago, and it felt important for me to resume the practice. Self-initiated creative projects have a raw magic all of their own, and are able to capture with more immediacy a current way of thinking, or preoccupation. I love the process of making my own products to be held and loved by supporters of my work. It was important to me, that this was a slow, lovingly curated project, collated with care.
I found the source text book in a box inherited from my grandparents on their deaths. My grandfather was a keen amateur scientist and learner though never had the opportunity to undertake any formal higher education. This project is one way of staying in conversation with him, though in real life I rarely talked for long with him as he was a quiet, private man. It is a personal project asking a universal question or two. It is designed to be considered gently and with attention to the body response. What lands, what doesn’t. What resonates.
I designed the wrap-around cover to have visual fluency with the original, but with a twist for the reader on the back. This itself is vaguely controversial, and would unlikely pass the social media censors, which time and again show us they are prone to prudish yet inconsistent double-standards, which most often punish the female form and women’s art. I like to make work where everything sings together in form and content.
The zine is published on beautiful, naturally flecked recycled paper and card stock, uncoated and matte finish to suit the nature of the project. It relies on a muted colour palette, which echoes some of the colours of Weathering. It was printed just up the road in Leeds, UK.
Each booklet will be numbered inside the front cover in pencil. The print run is limited to 100. Once they are gone, they are gone.
