May 15, 2025
Dear Candice and Adam,
I am writing to you from my back garden on a surprisingly glorious spring day here in Glasgow. You are on the other side of the earth for Candice’s magnificent book tour and more…
I have been thinking about how to begin this conversation, and why I had a feeling that I wanted to ask you both to write something for this book. I guess, in a way, we first met because of volcanoes, though which volcano was different for each of us. Mine is Eldfell, who I have chosen to spend my life with, though Eldfell may not have chosen me for the same.
I find myself wondering how each of you would, in turn, think about Boiling Milk Solfataras —a piece I made now half of my life ago, though I didn’t know then it was even a piece at all, let alone an impulse that I would only understand much later— how do you make contact with the inside of the earth? How do we form personal relationships with active geological processes? What is corporeal understanding? Frank Perret, an early volcanologist, monitored the seismic activity of Mount Vesuvius through clamping his teeth around the metal bedposts in his room, which were embedded in cement on the slopes of the volcano. Chattering teeth, chattering Earth. A volcano is like a body. It pumps lava throughout its system and breathes in and out through the mouth of a crater. A lava tube is like an artery coming out of the ventricle of a volcanic heart.
In Iceland every tap goes warm from geothermal heat, but there are so many steps between the volcanic chamber a mile under your feet and the mechanisms that bring hot water into your home, you forget there is a direct line reaching from below the earth’s crust to your cupped hands. So, I went to a local hardware store in Akureyri, got a small pan and some milk. Then I went to Mývatn, crouched at the edge of a boiling hot geothermal pool, and waited to see the milk begin to simmer. I asked a friend to go with me and, eventually, to take a picture. It was only later I learned that the Icelandic term for these types of pools is the ‘blue cooking milk’. Domestic deep time. That was in the summer of 1999 during my first artist residency in Iceland. I also asked my friend to join me at a deep fissure along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. As she is from Belgium, I asked her to stand on the Eurasian tectonic plate while I stood on the North American side—this became Meeting on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. I made a drawing of an erupting fissure that included two handwritten notes: ‘Will North America and Eurasia split?’ and ‘The lava is a scab.’ Now, with everything that is happening, I can’t stop thinking about that drawing.
Adam, you mentioned Bute as a place which brought us together, and perhaps it could do the same within our text, but I always think of Bute as almost still now—even though there is an extinct volcano behind my apartment and the island is made of two landmasses which crashed together to form the Highland Boundary Fault Line. More akin to the pace a Scottish seismologist told me years ago—tectonic plates move at the same rate as your fingernails grow. When I think of each of us, we are mobile. None of us live in the places we were born. We are migratory landmasses like our ancestor immigrant rocks. So somehow, I think of our connections as more agile than these quiet stones in very old places, though perhaps the slow movement of these particular tectonic plates are part of the reason we can easefully come together, become friends and colleagues here in Caledonia. The artist Robert Smithson said, “One pebble moving one inch every one million years is enough activity to keep me really excited.” But I think we have something different to discuss.
I was also thinking, Candice, about the French term you mentioned. Was it cartographie émotionnelle—emotional mapping—and how since early on in my work I have drawn maps which are primarily narrative to chart each project, and that while different locations feature within them, that ultimately they are maps of time rather than place. Maps of memory and feeling, with dotted lines drawn through sedimentary layers of geological and personal matter.
It came as a huge surprise Adam that you saw Boiling Milk Solfataras all those many years ago and that it stayed with you.
So, to embark on our task at hand, I hope these conversational core samples may prove useful.
With all my warmest regards (literally—it is hot here!),
Ilana
12 July, 2025
Dear Ilana,
I began drafting my letter to you on a flight from Edinburgh to Malta, not long after take-off. Outside, plumes of spun sugar clouds hung low against a pale blue sky. If I looked hard enough, I could just about make out the cracked lines of the British fields below. All this—the colours, the milky light, the porosity of sky and earth—reminded me of the deceptiveness of appearance, how there is nothing more oceanic than the view of the horizon from the skysill.
Thank you for your letter in May. It is true that volcanoes brought us all together. I met Adam days after the eruption of Te Puia o Whakaari, where my parents spent their 40th anniversary and thankfully returned unscathed. Two years later, it was Adam’s book on Mount Merapi that led me to your work. I remember the essay you read out at his book launch at the Hunterian Museum—the story of Eldfell, your birthday volcano, and how your visit intersected with the loss of your father. In Chinese mythology, it’s believed that two people who are destined together have an invisible red cord tied to their ankles. The red thread of fate. I was touched by the idea that the same chord might bring together human and mountain. Before meeting you, I had no language for this kind of kinship—but that winter evening, as I listened to your meeting with Eldfell, I was given my first taste of geologic intimacy.
Is this why, 37,000 feet above ground, I was reminded of your work Boiling Milk Solfataras? In the photo, you are holding a small copper pan of milk – the kind that’s used to serve delicate French sauces—and you are crouching at the edge of a geothermal pool to wait for the milk to simmer. The mise-en-place the earth itself. I am struck by your expression, a look of care and concentration that I have seen on the faces of chefs and gardeners. It is the motion of coaxing forth something that’s invisible to onlookers—a dish, a seedling, a new life. In the case of Boiling Milk, two things were about to emulsify: the personal and the geological.
I can’t help but to think about the invitational nature of that impulse. The way you were seeking not just to understand, but to connect. In this sense, Boiling Milk became a portal for viewers to place themselves in a setting that’s usually reserved for larger-than-life figures—heroes, explorers, spear-wielding storytellers. It’s as if with a single act of merging the domestic with the elemental, you have created a new, defiant message: that when it comes to matters as old as the earth’s heart, no grandiosity is allowed—all are welcome.
Perhaps it is for this reason that your work puts me in the mind of author Ursula K. Le Guin’s narrative world. The way she pushes back on the hero’s journey (the ‘killer story’) and recasts the spotlight on everyday details. Looking at Boiling Milk, I found myself welcomed, perhaps for the first time, into the private life of a volcanic body. I pictured skin forming on the small pot of milk as it reaches boiling point—that thin layer I used to pick off gleefully at my parents’ table as a child. Through your work, I was given a rare chance to rub shoulders with deep time.
I realised something else too: growing up, I had never witnessed geology through the female gaze. For how do we make sense of the earth’s heart without heroic tales and conquests? What would that story look like if we saw migratory rocks as singular souls, each with its own will and destiny? Your work, especially pieces like My Conglomerate Family and A Biography of New Landmasses showed me a possibility to relate to geologic drama in a new and vital way. How it is a matter of empathy—not just morphology—that separates us from vast geological processes.
Thank you for bringing up our earlier conversation about maps. What I had in mind was a genre of maps that shed light on the human condition—a late Renaissance trend (if we can call it that) later known as ‘sentimental cartography’. The one I was thinking of in particular is called Carte de Tendre, or the Map of Tenderness. It’s a 17th century map created by the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry, published in the first volume of a romance series called Clélie that shows the volatile landscape towards a beloved’s heart. More than anything I am drawn to the fact that it does not promise a way to love, but to tenderness. For in the end aren’t all connections born of a momentarily softening—a tectonic shift that lets us into the gilded landscape of another’s history? Another’s heart?
Much love,
Candice
13 July, 2025
Dear Ilana and Candice,
A few thoughts before our studio visit tomorrow!
Candice and I are back in Glasgow and I’m now, finally, getting to respond to your letter.
I wanted to begin at the beginning. But as beginnings typically go, this one is a bit foggy and there is probably more than one. I guess I’ll start with that photo of you boiling milk in the solfatara in Iceland. I have it in front of me now, open on the kitchen table, in Experimental Geography from 2008. You are kneeling in a red jacket with the hood up, wearing grey mittens, and holding a cup of milk. Behind is the crystal blue pool of the solfatara. There is fog and grey overcast skies. This image was my first encounter with you. On the frontispiece of the book I wrote “AWB May 09 Toronto dinner with Luis.” I don’t remember where I bought the book but I often note down something important I did during the day. In this case, it would have been dinner with the artist Luis Jacob.
Your picture stayed with me. At the time, I was mostly living in Toronto and Experimental Geography changed how I thought about my work. Your idea of geologic intimacy was a surprising proposition. I had no idea that it would guide my thinking to this day.
Geologic intimacy is challenging because nothing seems as far from the intimate as geology. Rocks are dead, aren’t they? Deep time is too abstract. The language for earthly processes belong to the sciences and often beguiling or boring technical knowledge. What could this intimacy be? How could we make it?
I didn’t know when I looked at your photograph that I would become a geographer or spend years living on a volcano in Indonesia. That actually, I also tried to create geologic intimacy. At first, I thought Mount Merapi volcano could teach me about something else—how to live with a volatile, unpredictable earth. But this shifted and opened into a reverence for the creative capacities of the earth itself.
As I continued to follow your work over the years, I learned that you developed a relationship with Eldfell. As I see it, your idea of geologic intimacy led you to reimagine kinship, to expand it beyond convention to encompass the non-living, the inhuman. Rocks are some of our oldest ancestors. At the same time, you didn’t lose sight of the precious individual relationships we built with our lithic companions—your shared birthday with Eldfell, your uncertainty about Eldfell’s vision of you.
Mount Merapi changed me. I came to understand the singular ways that geology is alive. Volcanoes refuse to let us think that geology is passive, the mere mute matter of rocks. For people like the three of us, from places without active volcanoes, these insights are transformative. A volcano shows us the vibrancy of rock making; they are the sites where the surface of the earth creates itself through its own self-destruction, or, perhaps more accurately—self-differentiation. They don’t really destroy so much as transmogrify: liquid to solid, rock to ash, cloud to rain. Volcanoes are lessons in how states of being change, how they contain multitudes.
I can see why you like Frank Perret, he was a great practitioner of geologic intimacy. He understood that his body was an instrument for modulating sensations from the earth, making them more or less intense, amplifying them. Did you know that he buried microphones in wine jugs beneath the observatory on Vesuvio so he could hear subterranean noises? And when he was on Mount Pelée in Martinique he insisted on sleeping in a hut close to the caldera so he could better feel the volcano.
Geologic intimacy creates a sense of connection and responsibility, doesn’t it? Geological matter is not dead, life is not only biological. If we can find the right way to attune to it and amplify geological movements, we can see how our bodies are extensions of planetary processes.
So you, Ilana, boiling milk and thinking about geologic intimacy has been a guide for me all of these years. Now we live in Glasgow and get to talk about these things over dinner or walking through ancient volcanic landscapes. But I want to thank you for your work. Your practice is probing the very edges of how we understand ourselves.
Bye for now…
AB
16 July, 2025
Dear Ilana,
You must be on your way to Iceland soon. What a treat to get to look at your work at your studio. I have pictures from the afternoon and am still thinking about all the things you showed us. (Paintings, sculptures, trinkets!) Thanks also for the delicious smoked salmon and bagel lunch. We always get fed so well by you and Alison!
I loved hearing the story behind how you came to make cave casts—growing sculptures in the petrifying springs of Saint-Nectaire in Auvergne. You explained that calcium carbonate deposits that usually take 100 years to form in another cave would only take one year to grow in the Fontaines Petrifiantes. This means various ‘skeletons’–—eroded bricks, other rocks and moulds—can become encrusted with a new layer of limestone in a matter of months and years, as opposed to centuries.
At one stage, you let me run my fingers over one of the pieces from the Physical Geology series—a bas relief of delicate, braille-like fractals based on a 3D model that originated from hand drawn etchings. Patterns reminded me of trace fossils. It was the first time I had seen or touched anything like it —art that is co-authored with time, with Earth itself. I realised then that you were interested in flipping the script: to initiate the kind of human intervention with geological processes that feels collaborative.
You mentioned you always draw and paint from memory. I want to ask: how do you read the spirit of a landmass? Does the true colour of a geologic kin reveal itself on first encounter? Or do you learn its nature over time?
More soon!
Warmly,
Candice
19 July, 2025
Dear Adam and Candice,
I am writing to you from Hveragerdi, a small geothermal town in the south of Iceland that I have been coming to for almost 30 years. I am here for a talk on An Anatomy of Mars. Two days before I arrived, the volcano near Grindavik started erupting again. I couldn’t see it from the plane, as the air is so thick with vog (volcanic fog) and the sky here is hazy, all the light subdued. Today someone explained that it is because of the volcano – like the year without a summer, of Mount Tambora and Frankenstein. My eyes sting a little and I can feel a strange sensation at the back of my throat. The volcano is in me.
In response to your last question, Candice, my initial thought is of a register once held at Volcano House on the craters edge of Kīlauea. Visitors were asked to record what they saw the volcano doing each day. Thus, a 90 year-long daily history or—a volcanic diary changing hands each entry, was constructed. A communal biography of a volcano.
My first visit to Eldfell was focused on looking down, to notice every detail, record what it felt like to actually be there. This led me to a tiny volcanic crystal (or a shard of glass from a windowpane) enrobed in a thin slip of once-molten rock—Icelandic Mineral Sample 18. I fixated on the charcoal-black lava flows which buried one house after another in 1973, without understanding that I was practising for the soon-to-be act of burying my father. The next visit, at almost 40, I found opalescent agates after sitting in a nook at the base of the volcano, my back nestled into tephra and tuff, conjuring what might come next—minerals mirroring pearly white milk teeth.
On a field visit before Eldfell and I turned 50, after losing my mother and my mother-in-law, I was filled to the brim with the sheer diversity of reds, pinks, oranges, ochres, celadon greens and rich terracottas—colours I knew my mother would love, that I made sure to remember for her. And after, at 50, Eadie died when I was on the volcano, and I saw stark fields in every direction of jagged night sky blue lava cooled into rock. A long way of saying, it’s taken 22 years to even get a small glimpse.
20 July
While am I am here, doing this, and this, and this—there is a volcano erupting just nearby.
23 July
When we drove to the airport, out of the window, I watched the volcano erupt. There was no glow, but smoke billowing out of the mouth of the new grown crater—now a small cone—still growing, still growing.
27 July
Lessons in Volcanism (what we can learn from volcanoes about life)
Adam when you mentioned geologic intimacy as a radical position—it reminded me of a very early work—a copy of a tear sheet from a magazine article about volcanoes, which I got out on loan from the ‘Picture Library’ in the now defunct Mid-Manhattan Library. In anticipation of my first trip to Iceland in the summer of 1997, I went and took out every item I could find on volcanoes and hot springs. In one article it said, “A volcano is simply a weak spot.” In another, “Volcanoes” and “Mouths”. I crossed out all the other words and circled these. The volcano as something, someone, who is vulnerable. That from a place of vulnerability, something grows. New landmass / new thoughts / new relationships.
My relationship with Eldfell hovers inside the Hebrew word Yirah. It can simultaneously mean awe and terror. I learned this term during recent conversations about grief with a radical trans Rabbi. Yirah can also describe an encounter with the divine or the realm of the spiritual. I am not at all religious, but if we consider the term spiritual as a stand in for the connection between things, then I can relate. When I was with Eldfell when I turned 50, the way I usually think of the volcano—as a way of understanding time, life cycles, mortality—shifted. As a few people, and my dog, all whom I deeply loved, had died in quick succession—suddenly, on the volcano, I felt enveloped in a profound sense of terror; that geologic time moves crushingly and violently forward, and we are so very tiny. I guess real relationships are not always pleasant or easy, they can be uncomfortable and challenging. So it was, and is, with me and Eldfell. We both continue to change. I feel close again to the volcano, now that my grief has begun to evolve, but as I age I am aware that every significant birthday I may get to share with Eldfell is momentous and startling and miraculous and scary and exactly what is worth living for.
Candice, you described an invisible red cord that ties two people destined to be together, and perhaps that is exactly how I am connected to Eldfell. I think too of The Marriage of the Rocks— Meoto Iwa—the Wedded Rocks: two sacred rocks bound together by a long straw rope in the ocean near Futami in Japan. Years ago I saw an illustration of this geologic union, and it felt so normal to imagine that two rocks could love each other. In my conversations with the Rabbi, as now both my parents are gone, we imagined together that perhaps the ancestors I can learn from now are geological.
There are certainly rocks which give birth to rocks (concretions). A tektite is a rock born by outer space and Earth meeting. Within my work, I often grow newborn rocks. They are not my children, but are generative processes of growth, borne out of a love of geologic wonder. Yes — rocks grow and change, as we do.
My warmest regards from the North,
Ilana
2 August, 2025
Dear Ilana and Candice,
What is the rope that ties us with rocks, our hardened elders that have seen so much? If only they could speak a language we understood.
Spinoza has a line in his Ethics that I find useful for thinking about ours and rock life:
“Bodies are reciprocally distinguished with respect to motion or rest, quickness or slowness, and not with respect to substance.”
He is asking us to think about movement, not stable identities or the stuff our bodies are made of. From his view, I imagine Eldfell and Merapi and you and I as bundles of different speeds, some as slow as continents, some as fast as eruptions. Speeds are relative. We are deep time and in split-seconds at the same time. But Eldfell and Merapi and we are all somehow also individuals. We each are one and many.
Eldfell was created by two tectonic plates moving away from each other. Merapi was created by two tectonic plates crashing into each other. From the viewpoint of our planet, those movements are connected, the jostling of plates along the surface of the earth are what sets volcanoes in motion. It could even be possible to trace the stress vectors that ripple from Indonesia to Iceland.
AB
18 August, 2025
Dear Ilana,
Thank you for coming with me to see Yiyun Li speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last Sunday. What serendipity to find out we share a love of her work. I’ve always associated Li’s writing with walking—with movement. I came upon her short stories in the summer of 2016, almost a decade ago. I remember listening to podcasts of her reading as I took long evening walks by the Iron Cove in Sydney—a bayside, mangrove-lined path that’s close to my parents’ home. On those 30-degree days, I’d walk to the water and wait for the heat to be broken by a southerly breeze. Li’s calm voice and the exquisite clarity of her heroines in the face of uncertainty buoyed me.
That summer, I had just returned from a six-month sabbatical to Europe and New York City. I’d quit my job in the newsroom, ended a 13-year relationship and felt the ground shift beneath my feet. At 35, I found myself building a new home on a vulnerable landscape. In the text that accompanies Twenty Years with Eldfell, you mentioned you planned the first trip to Eldfell from your parents’ bedroom in the year you turned 30 and your father was very ill. You said that there was no clear-cut reason why you wanted to go. “It was an impulse,” you wrote, “Landmass regeneration.”
What moves us at life’s turning points? Who or what calls to us before we can articulate the story behind a true impulse? I read today that “gut feelings are memories from the future”. I cannot begin to explain the science, but I love the idea of a roving self in deep time. For a minute, I pictured ‘Present You’—the Ilana we chat to, laugh and eat with—staging a meeting with your chosen geologic family in your parents’ room, back in 2003. The part of you that knew you would forge a life-long bond with Eldfell, who was born in the same year.
Or maybe our instincts are simpler, and more elegant than this?
In your last letter, you wrote that on the year you and Eldfell turned 50, Eadie, your dog, and a few people you loved deeply had died in quick succession. That visiting your birthday volcano was difficult because it would also mean visiting those losses. In Twenty Years with Eldfell, you described that in the midst of your worries, “an urgent and enlivening response began to grow—do something life-full”.
I wondered if it wasn’t the same ‘life-fullness’ that called to you all those years ago. There is a lifeforce in your work that I am deeply drawn to. In the same way that you find vulnerability generative, the very human exuberance you imbue in your watercolours helps us see eye to eye with volcanoes, rocks and lava— something I experience in the Eldfell series. When I look at the heart-shaped Self-Portrait as a Lava Bomb, for instance, I find myself recognising that the Earth’s heart can also break, and is alive with longing.
This luminosity—which makes itself known in the ‘life-full’ colours and shapes of your artwork (the geology of Digne-les-bains as ‘mille-feuilles’ being one of my favourites) causes us to encounter our geologic family with an open heart. You remind us that it is one’s duty—as much as a gift—to locate vitality in unexpected places. And from those small openings, if we’re lucky, joy grows—in spite of the crushing speed of time, in spite of sorrow.
After Yiyun Li’s talk on Sunday, we joked that each of us had scrawled down notes hastily like children. (Me, on the notes app of my phone, you, on a stray piece of paper in your tote). Li spoke with clear-eyed generosity about grief. Both her sons had died from suicide. Her book, as a tribute to her youngest, James, is called Things in Nature Merely Grows. An astonishing lifefull-ness in the face of unthinkable loss.
On my phone, I’d written down “verbs bear the brunt of loss”. We can chart the course of time on a human scale by saying a relationship was, a hometown was. But love—and who we are in relation to that love—is more complicated than that. Or at least more complex than the English tense can illustrate.
It seems that within love, there is always a necessary parting—even if it’s the ultimate parting on this earth. In my native Cantonese, the noun for time—or more specifically, the act of time-passing, is 光陰—which translates literally to ‘light and shade’. How wise to see our time on this Earth as mere flickers. Neither good nor bad, but as change itself. I had never contemplated these words properly, but what you said in your last letter, your experience of Yirah via Eldfell, reminded me of this. How the passing of time, seen against a geological scale can feel “momentous and startling and miraculous and scary”.
And yes, it is exactly what is worth living for.
With much love,
Candice
20 August 2025
Dear Ilana,
When you mentioned volcanoes as ‘weak spots’, my mind started racing. And then you described tektites!
I thought of the reading I had been doing recently about ‘astroblemes’, a word coined by the geologist Robert S. Dietz in the 1960s from the ancient Greek for ‘star wound’. He used it to describe the impact craters from asteroids hitting Earth because he was interested, surprisingly, in the geology of wounds, the shape and new rocks formed by collision with extraterrestrial bodies. What struck me was the physiology of the term, how Dietz was describing the Earth as a body, and how that connected with ancient ways of collapsing the microcosm into the macrocosm, the human body, earth, and cosmos all mirrored (and governed) each other.
What was not ancient about Dietz though was his experience of the 20th century. Like many geologists of his generation, he grew up in a world in conflict. He became a scientist under the Cold War shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction. Part of how Dietz came to understand the geology of astroblemes was studying the rocks formed at nuclear test sites in the United States. He saw how the human war machine created rocks like asteroids smashing into the earth.
Your work, to me, seems like an antidote to Dietz. So much of how the earth sciences have come to understand geology was through the traumas of war; they are sciences of war.
Your show, The Library, at the National Museum of Scotland in 2013 had a section in it called ‘moments of contact’ where you featured tektites as well as desert glass, carrier shells, ghost minerals, and agates formed in Eldfell. As I see it, you develop this idea of ‘contact’ as full of vulnerability—danger, death, pain. But you manage to acknowledge the volatility of the earth without a drive to master it, unlike Dietz.
The tektite is formed by a meteorite hitting the Earth, spraying lava into the atmosphere, and cooling into gravel sized rocks as they fall back to earth. The stone is the remembrance of a moment of contact. Your encounter with them at the National Museum then became another contact zone between yourself, an archive, and a volatile episode in earth’s history. You also remind us that tektites are often used as jewellery.
I watched your astonishing film The Library. It opens with images of you pulling up a layer of moss and exposing the dark earth underneath, bespeckled with brilliant flakes of mica. Another contact. This time beneath the surface, and with a geology that is shared with your hometown, New York. Suddenly, the Earth becomes personal again, the macro in the micro, they govern each other.
AB
29 August, 2025
Dear Ilana and Adam,
I have been thinking about scales – human, geological and temporal. How each of them figures in everyday stories. Stories that add up to a life.
Like Adam, I am spellbound by the opening scene of your film, The Library. There is something so otherworldly about seeing sheets of shiny mica being unearthed by your bare hands—the way the mineral lay just underneath a layer of long grass and moss; barely hiding —as if waiting to be found to the call of, “Ready or not here I come!”
In the film you explained that for years, the skyscrapers of New York came to sprout in Mid-town because of the prevalence of mica schist in the area. The ground is more stable where the schist is closer to the surface. The sturdy bedrock, formed just over 450 million years ago during a collision between North America and the Atlantic Ocean, now holds up much of the Manhattan skyline that glints from afar.
New York City holds a special meaning to all three of us. Adam did an artist residency there, I found my way back to writing at a tiny Park Slope writer’s workshop. New York is where you grew up—the setting of your origin story. I loved learning about your life via the minerals of your first home. At our studio visit in July, I’d held the two Herkimer diamonds that were on your desk and felt their weight on my palm. They came naturally with 18 facets, you told us. You added that 18 is a lucky number in Judaism, since it is the numeric value of the Hebrew word chai (חי), meaning ‘life’.
That first time you visited Jamie Newman, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, she had a jar of Herkimer diamonds sitting like lollies at her desk. It was the day she would show you the Subway Garnet (found on 35th Street between Broadway and 7thAvenue) in the belly of the museum’s stores—“perfect, blood red, the size of a large grapefruit”, you wrote.
All this came back to me as I studied the hand-drawn map that accompanied Minerals of New York. I had never moved through anyone’s personal history with a map before. (But why not? Why don’t more of us have maps of our past?) Yours is a cartography of connections. It charts the sites of New York’s minerals and where intimate, familial memories took place—the scale is the story. Reading the vignettes and their accompanying gemstones, I am at once traversing the personal and geological. The city a palimpsest of human and cosmic narratives —layered, like the gleaming leaves of mica in your film.
On that rainy July afternoon, as you guided us through the artwork in your studio, Adam remarked that your work does something wondrous with scale. That they invite us to consider the vast via the most intricate openings—the ‘anti-monumental’. I remember next to the Herkimer diamonds and your sculptures was a copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Weeks later, I would find on your map a Sagan quote, My family began “in the interiors of collapsing stars”.
What is the hardest map you’ve ever made? And do you still have it?
Much love,
Candice
2 September, 2025
Dear Candice and Adam,
(Contact Zones)
The hardest map I ever made was when we were trying to have a child. Every day I made tiny drawings imagining cells dividing and growing. Then when I had a miscarriage, we burned them all in the fireplace, except one which I have kept ever since.
I was thinking again about Yiyun’s talk—the nature of the impulse to make art in the face of the incomprehensible—such as the cruelty and collapse we see around us now in every direction (though not in my garden where early autumn flowers are blooming in floods of colours mirroring the hues that will follow later when the leaves turn lava-crimson-orange-fire). I had a conversation recently with an artist named Hunter about this, and we agreed that making work was one of the only ways to retain our humanity, to insist on it. Though even as I write that, another thought comes to mind—all my work is only possible because of other people. That thrilling mutual recognition is actually the core (whether animal, vegetable, mineral or each other). And that is a proposition for another approach—that of connection in the deepest sense.
I remember when I wanted to find a way into the stores of the American Museum of Natural History, I asked Peter (the now retired Curator of Mineralogy at National Museums Scotland) if he might know anyone there. He introduced me to Jamie. Jamie introduced me to the Subway Garnet, and Minerals of New York began. Before I left for Big Island, volcanologists from Iceland and Lancaster sent out a volcanic dispatch, and I ended up on a still molten lava flow. It turns out I have several conglomerate families, and one is an assembly of earth scientists, curators, friends, geographers, anthropologists, keepers of collections and caretakers for sites of geologic wonder.
I am still reeling hearing the word astroblemes—the geology of the wound. The artist Yee I-Lann described ‘the violence of administration’. An echo of the 20th century geology you describe, Adam—of the monstrosity of human eruption—crushing and separating, disembowelling mountains and rocks. In my work, we also use the tools of the earth sciences laboratory—melting minerals, polishing thin sections, pulverising soil until it more closely resembles sifted flour. Our hands enact the geologic process when preparing the turmeric-toned ochre that fell from the ancient stromatolite-rich lakebed deposits of Lake Orcadie—which is no longer a lake at all, but land. We salvage nomadic rocks and minerals before they wash out to sea in the rolling tides (or in hurricanes decades later).
What comes to mind is how many geologists (and other collaborators) have put astonishing stones in my hands. Claire asked me to close my eyes and placed a Martian meteorite in my palm. Clive gave me Erebus crystals rumoured to come out of the volcano in pairs. John passed along a single book of mica, along with Ordnance Survey coordinates of where to find more. Hugh gave me rainbow obsidian linked to his dreams about glaciers and volcanoes. Gísli sent me a lava bomb that flew out of Eldfell. Alan had a bag of ‘Parent Material’ from James Hutton’s farm packed and ready to go. Nadine revealed a box filled with L’etoiles des Alpes and asked me to choose one. Sarah told me about body stones. And David showed me a cave cast in his ‘Oddities Drawer’ at the Manchester Museum, an encounter with an object that changed everything.
The more I try to shorten this note, the more I want to add. How can I thank everyone I have ever grown sculptures with; everyone who has taken me to see fossils, caves, basalt columns? Or the Print Studio, with our micro-volcanic eruptions in mica, marble and clay…and then, and what about…
All these moments of contact that compose a work, and a life.
Lots of love from here in the soon dusk garden, where I should be starting dinner (well actually beets are already roasting), but instead I am writing to you both,
Ilana
This text was commissioned by the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh as part of a book entitled Ilana Halperin: What is Us and What is Earth celebrating 25 years of the work of Ilana Halperin. Originally from New York and based in Glasgow in Scotland since 1998, Halperin makes drawings, text-drawings, watercolours, sculptures and photographs that seek to locate the personal in the geological, to collapse deep time and human time so that we can better understand ourselves in the natural world to which we belong.
The book brings together work made throughout Halperin’s career, from Boiling Milk (Solfataras), 1999, an image of Halperin boiling milk in a geothermal pool in Iceland, to The Rock Cycle (from stromatolites to diamonds), 2026, new sculptures she has made that chart the life cycle of calcium carbonate rock in Scotland, France and New York. Writing by Paul Bonaventura, Catriona McAra with Claire Cousins, and Stephanie Straine sheds new light on Halperin’s work and career, while the sequence of letters included above between Ilana Halperin and friends geographer Adam Bobbette and writer Candice Chung offer personal insight into the thought processes behind this intensely beguiling body of work.