It's about...

- geologic time
- geologic history
- personal history
- man's relationship to the earth
- how we got here/ all that came before us

Jewelry records our personal history. Jewelry objects become index fossils of our own personal time scale.

Printmaking (intaglio in particular) is making an imprint; a man made fossil. Lithography is using stone to make an image (a fossil bearing stone, I might add). That image is etched into the stone and then later eroded away, becoming part of that stone's missing history. In strata it would show up as an unconformity. In print we have the image, but can we date it to the stone?

It's about an appreciation for something so unspectacular as the earth beneath our feet. It's easy to love trees and flowers and birds and mammals. It's harder to love a hard, unfeeling mass of elements in precise structures, the story of their history out in the open for anyone who cares to take the time to read it. But where would all our pretty flowers and mammals be without the foundations of the earth itself?

There's a billion years of history lying at your feet.

But so what?

A Halloween Tale of Horror. . .

A few years ago, when I was an undergraduate, my art history professor made a little Halloween slide show of historic art for us. First he started off with a little Goya, like this:
And this.
Then we moved up through history and got to some Francis Bacon, like this:

And then (and here's the really scary part) he ended with this!:

Ok, maybe not this exact house, but let's face it, they're all pretty much the same.
Have a Happy Halloween!

Thoughts. . .

Oolitic Limestone (look familiar?)
History/ Determining the past/Inferring the past
Identity/Identification
Time/Geologic Time
Weathering/Erosion = Passage of Time
Relationship of mineral grains indicates formation of rock
Relationship of chemical elements determines mineral type
Our (human) relationship to the earth? To time? To adorment? To the things we wear (dare I say fashion?!)
Collection. Collecting as means to identify/investigate
Collecting as human nature
Stability/Near permanent
The beginning of everything, the end of everything
More later. . . .