Curving the Judd & Sediments of Chora

A Rock-a-Bye Collaboration

Curving the Judd by Tim Brennan and Sediments of Chora by Julieanna Preston form a dispersed duet within the wider Rock-a-Bye project: a series of international artist collaborations initiated by Preston.

These two solo works emerged from an iterative process of call and response: shared questions around ancestry, labour, voice and material transmission: each piece shaped by its own geology, lineage, and mode of address.

Though filmed continents apart, the videos are bound by echo, ritual, and a kind of lullaby logic: coal and basalt, voice and rocking, memory and earth.

 

 

 

Sediments of Chora 

Preston’s video figures a wooden rocking chair she brought with her from the United States twenty-eight years ago, a chair that comforted her and her daughter. Its lulling motion and creaks are in tune and pace with a spoken word poem that rehearses the first names of her daughter’s maternal and paternal lines. The heavy black basalt rock serves as anchor to what now is a forever home.

 

 

Curving the Judd

This video work draws on my paternal lineage: Irish coal miners recruited to work in the County Durham coalfield in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. The title references a mining technique: the cutting of a curved block, or judd, from the coalface to enable extraction. Curving the Judd takes this procedure as material, linguistic and metaphoric form: the judd is at once the coal cut from the seam and a paternal line drawn from Ireland into the Durham coalfield. Through voice, repetition and visual rhythm, coal, labour and lineage are brought into relation without being resolved into a single narrative. Excavation becomes less a recovery of the past than an exposure to what remains: transmitted, fragmented and still in circulation.

 

These two works stand in dialogue across time zones and terrain: each tracing familial and geological resonances through sound, image, and material presence.

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View Sediments of Chora :

Sediments of Chora, Julieanna Preston, 2025

A basalt lullaby to maternal ancestry and homecoming. – Julieanna Preston

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View Curving the Judd :

Curving the Judd, Julieanna Preston, 2025

A paternal line, curved as coal. – Tim Brennan

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Visitors are invited to view both works together: distinct voices and overlapping rhythms brought into relation across place, ancestry and material transmission.

 

These two solo works: Curving the Judd (Tim Brennan) and Sediments of Chora (Julieanna Preston), emerged through a dispersed collaboration across geographies and generations. Each video stands alone, yet they speak in resonance: coal and basalt, ancestry and breath, labour and lullaby.

Created as part of Preston’s wider Rock-a-Bye project, these paired works explore the ritual, transmission, and material legacy of familial lines—through poetic utterance, elemental substance, and acts of care.

While Curving the Judd traces a paternal line drawn from Ireland into the County Durham coalfield, Sediments of Chora locates its pulse in volcanic stone and maternal naming. Together, they form a duet of situated voicings: tactile, sonic, and haunted by touch.

 

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