Petrograph Gallery

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Y Gostrel

i Pam, er cof am Steve Petro

Onid o law i law

y daw pob dim

yn y diwerdd!

Syllu or gostrel,

malachit a jasbis,

a'n gleiniau'n gyno.

Saif ar y pontran

yn dysf i lafw

un a'i gariod at garreg.

Ei thoeio a'i ddwylo

ei choethi ii'w harddwch,

sychu'r llwch

a'i naddu'n lan.

Cyn ei gollang

yn rhydd eto,

o draeth bywyd

y draeth cyn troi'n

eiddo i arall.

Fel heddiw

-- o law i law

yn daw ein dydd.

The Costrel

to Pam, in memory of Steve Petro

Isn't everything

handed down

in the end?

I gaze at a bottle

malachite and jasper,

intricate stones.

It sits above the fireplace,

witness to the labour

of one man's love for stone.

Diminution refined

in beauty,

sweeping aside the ash

clean hewn.

Before releasing

it free again--

from the beach of life

it arrived, turned

for another to possess

today--

from hand to hand, comes our day.

by Menna Elfyn (written 15. iv. 2013)

Costrel, for those who don't know--like me--is a word in biblical Welsh word for "keeping wine." My friend Menna Elfyn wrote this poem for me in memory of my father, after I gave her one of his "snuff bottles." Menna is the foremost poet writing in the Welsh language today--and one of the most translated poets in Europe. My dad's "snuff bottles" are hand-carved from the mineral specimens he collected all his life. The ones pictured above are of malachite with a jade top, and jasper with a jade top. I put "snuff bottles" in quotes, because while they're modeled on antique Chinese snuff containers (another passion of his), they aren't hollow, so they aren't actually useable as bottles. They're beautiful objects without a purpose. They're art.

The bottle I gave Menna has a malachite base and a jasper top. These two

are made from pebbles collected on the beach at Cape Cod, polished on a grinding wheel, and sport rhodocrosite tops.

In my dad's files I found a hand-written description on yellow legal-pad paper of how he made the bottles. Here's what he wrote: "The stone bottles were made first by blocking them out on a 6" homemade diamond saw; then by grinding into bottle shapes using 100 and 200 grit 6" grinding wheels; then sanding and polishing using 220, 400, and 600 grit wet sanding paper and two homemade sanding wheels; then they were then polished using cerium oxide on hard felt wheels.

Most of the stone bottles are not drilled out (several were drilled about one half-inch deep); the tops are glued on and they are not removable (except for the few which are drilled, as noted above).

The stone bottles were prepared from the following list of minerals: chrysoprase, pink quarts, carnelian, sodalite, pale purple amethyst, striped jasper, agatized palm wood, yellow tiger eye, laboradorite, red jasper, jade, moss agate, malachite, rhodochrosite, brown obsidian, and calcite (fluorescent red, from Franklin, NJ)....

May the reader of this document, sometime in the future, have as much fun interpreting it as I had in making and acquiring this collection. Good luck!"

Stephen Petro

This final group, from left to right, is made from a beach pebble with an agate top; tiger's eye with a pale amethyst top; and aventurine with an agate top.

Thanks to both Steve and Menna for the beauty.

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Artist's Statement

Petrographs are silver gelatin images printed on stone. My name—Petro—means rock in Greek. What a stroke of luck….

When natives of northeastern Siberia saw a view camera for the first time they called it, “a three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.”

Petrographs do the same thing. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows to the bedrock, they juxtapose the “snapshot” span of our mortal memories with the vastness of geological time. And that puts humans’ experience on earth back into perspective. We are not the planet’s masters. We’re just one of many species passing through deep time.

I grew up with rocks in the house—my father was a mineral collector—but I don’t make petrographs for keeps. After harvesting rocks from rivers, seabeds, and quarries, I coat them in photographic emulsion, print them with images from the human sphere, and return them to their original locations. Then time, water, sunlight, and weather do their erosive work as I record the process with my camera. The results, revealing the rocks as they’re distorted, obscured, and weathered by ever-shifting environmental factors, evoke in days the passage of years, and tether us to natural cycles of decomposition and replenishment. The installations, which scientists assure me have no ill-effects on their host eco-systems, are fleeting. Our images disappear, and the rocks return to their own silent business.

There is a Welsh word—hiraeth—that has no cognate in English. It suggests something akin to the “presence of absence,” and refers to a deep, and creative, longing for something unattainable that exists only in the imagination, possibly beyond place or time. In the case of Wales, a subject state since the 13th century, it derives from a longing for a national history that should have been but never was: a gap filled by myths, legends, and once-and-future yearnings.

Petrographs exist in the gap between human consciousness and the world around us. As our images erode in the sea or a river or under the snow, or the sun weathers and cracks them, their weathering enacts the presence of absence before our eyes: the hiraeth of the natural cycle. They insist that our lives are snapshot moments, and that we belong to the earth—that it is our home.

Petrographs’ insistence on our place in the natural order is a sometimes beautiful, occasionally unnerving reminder of how place shapes us—the rocks’ histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, ancient seas, fire, and ice, become miniature landscapes that give mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the environment.