Like a dusty notebook turning up in an attic, Fossil obliges the reader to take pause. What was that task that took you up the ladder anyway? Listen instead to this unexpected voice: it is intimate, idiosyncratic.
Phillips makes the sum of these pages a meditation on land and time and lifeforms. Cutouts from books and newspapers, photographs of fossil specimens and handwritten annotations to printed matter all underscore her preoccupations – human impact on geology, ecosystems and climate.
In the form of a note to self, this collection reminds us – as evanescent witnesses and ‘future fossils’– to stand tall while we can and to ‘actively care’. The back cover of Fossil states: This is not a jellyfish. Not only books have spine.