Melanie Wheeler,

Artist, Educator, Producer, Rock Enthusiast

I Spread My Limbs & Grope for Firm Ground, 2025

Text, video, installation

This work is the result of my residency in UCL's Geology Department, where I have been working with Rock Preparation & Laboratory Technician Joseph Paine, to curate the collection and learn about its history and significance. The residency continues an interest that runs through both my creative and professional practice, in utilising 
creative methods and collections to translate scientific research and exchange knowledge across disciplines.

A constellation of text, video, objects, images and furniture converge to create an internal geography that the audience are invited to enter and become actors in the construction of meaning. ‘I Spread My Limbs & Grope for Firm Ground’ follows a quest to save the Geology Collection that moves between real and imagined spaces and experiences within the institution, in response to the recent closure and demolition of UCL’s Geology Museum, The Rock Room. Along the way the narrative indulges in material engagements and geo-mythologies, whilst stretching the in/tangibility of sci/fiction. The work aims to challenge, or at least prod, the institution's boundaries and the modality of the exhibition; by questioning forms of knowledge production and mutating contingent value systems.