Discern Your Path
1) A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden.
2) Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in stone.
[Latin petra, rock; Old English vers, from Latin versus a furrow]
Pierre Jardin coined the neologism 'petriverse' to encapsulate the entanglement of rocks and writing peculiar to his project. This project is organized into two topoi, Garden and Library, which correspond to the term’s dual meanings.
The Petriverse Garden, a world composed of rocks, is a space of telluric lurings which introduces visitors to petric practices such as rock-fishing and stone-stacking, shows them displays of igneous ligneous inosculation, and exposes them to a micro-cosmic megalithic force field in which temporal anomalies have been detected.
The Petriverse Library, comprising words composed of rocks, houses eclectic writings in philosophical and literary registers. The Stoned Thinking section includes work in Animaterialist philosophy inspired by the axiom ‘stone is the new green,’ a curious cabinet of Philosophers’ Stones, and a brief and easy wandering down the Daoist way of Chinese stone appreciation. The Library’s Petric Poetics section develops a semiotics of signifying stones, and presents work in new genres, including the Geo-ode and Rockery Reveries.
This project reveals an arboreal structure: reading these first pages, you have moved up the trunk of the tree. Now the trunk forks into branches. These main branches will fork into smaller ones. When you have gone all the way out on a limb (reached the end of the last path of a main branch), your crowning achievement will be rewarded with another main branch to explore.
Follow Pierre Jardin's compositions of a life in stone cultivated by
1) collecting and working with stones (The Petriverse Garden);
2) evincing a philosophy that grows organically from these practices (The Petriverse Library: Stoned Thinking);
3) evoking a language that grows organically from these practices (The Petriverse Library: Petric Poetics).
This page has paths:
- Artist's Statement Paul A. Harris