Why contemporary art is on the rocks
What is a stone? In a cemetery it’s solemn, in a shoe it’s a nuisance. A diamond ring and a lump of coal share mineral characteristics but can’t be swapped as gifts. Stones can be markers and monuments and weapons; treasure or rubble. Yet, despite their disparate uses and meanings, minerals are often imaginatively grouped together to signify stability and endurance. To be ‘stony’ is, of course, to be tough, inflexible, unmoving. Monarchies and marriages are conferred through precious stones precisely because they are institutions conceived as everlasting – ‘til death do us part, and at death carve our names into stone. Stones are thought of as absolutes. You hit rock bottom. You make yourself crystal clear.
In the messy, malleable sludge of geological reality though, like monarchies and marriages rocks are, in fact, not all that stable. They erode and sediment. They are carried, carved, deposited, shattered; mapped, mythologised, named, used to pray and pave. Stones are contradictory: static and restless; ecology and commodity.
Artist Miya Ando submerged aluminium sheets in electrochemical baths and plated them with sapphire crystals which take up dyes more readily – transforming industrial materials into radiant, ephemeral artworks, such as 2011’s Tides.
