The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin cements a breccia with traditions by cobbling together conglomerate materials, composing an uplifting landscape grounded in rock-gardening, geo-humanities, and earth art. Prospecting readers who mine the Petriverse will tap strata of data on Chinese lithophilia and California tectonics, animaterialism and geomedia. Site visitors may strike veins of vibrant materials, including abstract geology and concrete poetry, spiritual exercises and cosmic gardens.

The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a work of speculative theory that documents Pierre Jardin’s apprenticeship to stone, in Deleuze’s sense of apprenticeship of a process in which “to learn is first of all to consider a substance…as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted….  One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood” (Deleuze, 4). Stone is a primordial substance, what Isamo Nogiuchi calls “our fundament” (in Paternosto, 181), the medium in which humans have evolved and lived. Consequently, it has a deep cultural history: as sculptor Jake Harvey observes, “The heritage of stone is an athenaeum containing a rich repository that, like the material itself, has accumulated over a vast timescale” (Stone, 9). The Petriverse taps into and adds to this repository, through work with rocks in a variety of media, contexts, and disciplines. It culminates a decade of collecting cobble, composing displays in a contemplative practice of rock-gardening, and photographing and writing about them for an eponymous blog. The project reflects extensive research and travel, and presents various thought experiments and experimental writings that intertwine lithic and linguistic signs in expressive forms.

The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin represents an endeavor to compose a life in stone. As theory, it serves as a capsule of Anthropocene ruminations, or a study in speculative geo-philia. As practice, it cultivates an embodied, mindful absorption in stone, or a study in geo-aesthetics. As this digital work, it is a world with an arboreal structure of forking paths, where you can branch out, go out on a limb, or follow your whim as you prefer, or prefer not to.