This banner shows scanned sections of drawings on paper made by coating a stone with India ink or tempera paint and rolling it across the paper hundreds of times. Because of the stone’s potato-like form, it lists and lurches unpredictably as it wobbles its way from one edge of the paper to another. The resulting paths evoke turbulent flow, as if a rounded pebble were tumbling in falling water. The composition’s fluid-dynamical quality is created by simple variation of its elements: a checkerboard of two square scans oriented in different directions, in which the position of the stone changes.

The drawings embody collaborative balance between art and nature, painter and rock: they are not written in stone, or by stone, but with stone. The process resembles the work of some of the Abstract Expressionists in its interplay of intent and surrender.  The drawings may be seen as diagrams of the forces that composed them, and by extension the forces that formed the rock.  The seemingly flat surface reveals on closer scrutiny layers of lines deposited over one another like strata, geologic layers of patterns recording the movements of stone.