In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he recounts “Nothing perishes in this world; but things merely vary and change their form.”
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In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he recounts “Nothing perishes in this world; but things merely vary and change their form.”
The rock cycle is a geological concept that describes how rocks change from one type to another through geologic time. Rocks also evolve from life to stone. We are part of a deep time calcium carbonate family tree. We are animal and mineral at the same time.
Over the last few years, I started collecting eroded bricks from the beach in Kilchattan Bay on the Isle of Bute. The bricks are from an old brick and tile works on the island that closed years ago. They threw the remaining bricks into the Firth of Clyde, where for over one hundred years they tumbled in and out with the tides each day, becoming more like rocks again. In a nearby bay, there was a tradition of throwing plates into the water when someone died—from ground, to table, to ocean. These bricks from Kilchattan Bay call to mind the idea of Domestic Deep Time.
There is another rock cycle, one that incorporates our own geologic processes. I remember that at the same time my mother was diagnosed with dementia, I met with a geologist in Yosemite. He told me that the Lyell Glacier will likely be completely gone in five years, about the same length of time it could take for my mother’s cognition to melt away. I have been thinking about the act of geological grieving. I wrote down the phrase BEARING WITNESS and underlined it several times the other day. This is not a passive act, just as grief is not a point of stasis. I guess with all the current seismic upheaval of our contemporary moment, geological grief asks us to consider the relevance of what we do, while simultaneously demanding that we forge active responses in the face of the incomprehensible. So, in a discrete geologic action, I picked up bricks from Kilchattan Bay and sent them to Saint-Nectaire in France.
There, seven generations ago, the Fontaines Pétrifiantes were founded to create limestone sculptures through the same process that forms stalactites in a cave. In a normal limestone cave, it takes one hundred years for limestone to grow one centimeter, but in these caves it takes only one year.
At the Fontaines objects are left to rapidly encrust in new layers of stone as part of a unique geo-cultural alliance. To cultivate a new branch of this hybrid geology, eroded bricks from the Isle of Bute merge with layers of French rock to create new international conglomerates formed by hand, sea, carbonate life, and cave – through a process of mineral-rich accumulation that began 70,000 years ago in a chain of volcanic eruptions.