The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin: by Paul A. Harris Main Menu Paul A. Harris

Jardin Transcribes Johnson

2 Nothing in Stone
This work is a petric poetic tribute to Ronald Johnson’s 1970 poem of “earthearthearth” repeated for six lines. The power of Johnson's text is that it induces the eye to shift from reading "EARTH" to parsing the letters into EAR, HEAR, ART, HEART, and HEARTH as well, which in turn turns the mind to combining the words into implied meanings. When Jardin set about transcribing Johnson's text in stone, the limited space of The Petriverse dictated that he distill the poem to the minimal elements which would replicate its results. What is the most compressed form in which letters could evoke the myriad words Johnson elicits from EARTHEARTHEARTH?


Jardin deployed brown jasper pebbles collected at Moonstone Beach and black igneous shards from the Yuha Desert to provide contrasting colors and textures. These different typefaces create enough contrast to enable simple static words to become complex dynamic elements in a visual poem that, like its inspiring original, invites readers to discern words within words, and combine them to create multiple meanings.


 

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  1. Signifying Stones Paul A. Harris

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