Blood from Stone: Impressions of Life was an exhibition funded by an Arts Council, England, Residency, in collaboration with the Forestry Commission, as part of The Forest is the Museum initiative, and managed by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, situated at Fineshade Wood, Northamptonshire. This body of work gathers together the historic associations between nature, industry and culture within the situation of the forest environment. Carter utilised the materiality of the forest, combining the rust on decomposing industrial drag-line buckets from the early iron smelting industry carried on in the region, with oak galls, a produce of abundant oak trees within the site. With these materials, Carter made up Oak Gall Ink, a form of rudimentary ink known to have been used by nineteenth-century writers such as John Clare, to make a series of print works.

Carter’s research focuses on interconnections between human and non-human species and the agency of each. Responding to work in the Anthropocene, Blood from Stone: Impressions of Life, makes explicit the kinds of relationships described as ‘psychic spaces’ (Rugg, 2010). These also become clear in the impressions made on paper that resemble zoological or botanical illustrations but which, in fact, appear through a combination of happenstance, apophenia and klecksographic printing methods.

Alongside this innovative and experimental approach to printing, Blood from Stone: Impressions of Life incorporates a thorough examination of local and national archives, particularly in relation to the history of this site in early industrialisation. Carter made visits to John Clare’s home in Helpston, and to Charles Darwin’s collection in the Zoology Museum at Cambridge, contributing important detail to the exhibition overall. Carter’s work addresses the vitalizing qualities of natural materials as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennet, 2009), material agency and the incorporation of object-oriented ontology (Latour, 2011).