The artist Katrina Palmer's End Matter (2015) was made on and about the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England. Taking shape across a book, installation and audio walks, Palmer's work centers on a fictional organization called the Loss Adjusters who are occupied with counterpoising the holes and cavities of Portland against the buildings and monuments constructed from Portland stone, an oolitic limestone which has been quarried on the Isle since Roman times. Although End Matter engages a sculptural grammar of carving, cuts and loss, the hole does not appear as void-like, entropic or abyssal, in distinction from how this form is typically mobilized and analyzed within the history of post-war European and North American sculpture. By tracing Portland stone's circulation from prison labour to the monuments of the British establishment and colonial infrastructures, Gogarty argues that Palmer's End Matter illuminates the ideological and material construction of history and heritage, repositioning the hole as a sculptural form which can be understood as a conduit rather than a void. 

About Dr. Larne Abse Gogarty 

Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She is Associate Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Larne is the author of two books: What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill, 2022) Currently, she is working on a new project about recent sculpture, manufacture and commodity culture. Larne has written catalogue essays for artists including Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, and Gray Wielebinski and regularly writes criticism, mainly for Art Monthly. In 2026, she curated the exhibition Conspiracies at the Warburg Institute, London. She is in the editorial group for Selva and Oxford Art Journal.

Image credit: Katrina Palmer, End Matter: The Loss Adjusters 2015. Photo: Brendan Buesnel