PORTLAND, that mysterious, craggy, romantic island of rock that is barely attached to Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, is a constantly inspiring place for artists, and a new exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery in Easton Lane and Tout Quarry Sculpture Park and Nature Reserve, explores the responses of a group of sculptors to its geology, history and environment.

One Island – Many Visions presents a curated exhibition of Portland’s landscape legacy with a symposium and a programme of workshops and events developed over 18 months in partnership with 27 artists from the Royal Society of Sculptors and Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust (PSQT). Speakers at the symposium include David Buckland, founder-director of Cape Farewell project on Climate Change. The work focuses principally on environmental issues.

PSQT hasa long-established track record of pioneering interdisciplinary site-specific work across the arts, earth sciences and heritage. Creative director Hannah Sofaer says: “The project has enabled a number of artists to develop and expand their work – discovering new ways of working and furthering their practice.”

The title of the show reflects the unique nature of Portland and its ability to engage diverse responses by artists to its landscape and features. Participating artists include leading international names and emerging contemporary talents. The project represents a fresh artist response to this site, which is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Significance, since the inaugural sculptors Antony Gormley, Philip King, Phyllida Barlow and Richard Long were involved with the conservation of Tout Quarry.

Hannah Sofaer’s Living Land Archive, which she has collected and recorded over 40 years, documents the landscape in continuous change. This has been a powerful resource for the participating artists’ work, contributing to the archival process and legacy of the environmental debate.

Antony Gormley has said: “It is through art that we communicate what it feels like to be alive… Can we use art as a way of investigating this perilous time?”

These artworks, transmitted or perceived by the senses to the landscape, reflect the context of Tout Quarry Sculpture Park and Nature Reserve with its Site of Special Scientific Interest status (SSSI), not only in a physical sense, but dynamically through concepts including sound, movement, poetry and performance.

Tout Quarry naturally displays change through flora and fauna, and weather patterns that gauge what survives and what is in decline. The quarry acts as a barometer for these climate changes.

Among the artists with work in One Island – Many Visions are two Somerset sculptors Fiona Campbell and Chris Dunseath. The exhibition continues to 31st October.

Pictured: Riot by Fiona Campbell, photograph by Russell Sacha; Lamprocyclas Maritalis by Roger Stephens; Trace by Anna Gillespie