The vibrant patterns, intricate lines, and brilliant colors revealed in mineral cross-sections and core samples seem to reveal the secret lives of stones. The “landscapes” in Ruin Marbles and sliced sandstone enable fantasies of an artistic animating power in nature. These forms seem to spring directly from some mythic lithic time, inviting conjectural accounts of their formation by primordial chthonic forces. Roger Caillois, famed for his collection of exotic stone samples, sees a patterned mineral slice as “an irreversible cut made into the fabric of the universe ... which attests ... to the hidden laws of our shared formation where the whole of nature was borne along.”

Caillois’s “mystical materialism” epitomizes a speculative geo-aesthetics grounded in a deep time beyond history. Contemporary geophysical materialism also recognizes “our shared formation” with stone—not by decrypting “hidden laws” of deep time, but through recognizing ourselves as “walking, talking minerals.” Mineral slices and core samples as objects of aesthetic contemplation cannot be separated from the manner of their extraction, and the economic forces driving them. The cutting into the earth—coring and drilling and fracking—we do to dig into deep time is expressed in the composition in the aggressive cutting of the images into the visual plane.