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

Sweet Not-things

2 A Geo-ode Written in Stone
Stone lovers see striations in the shape of signifiers as love letters from the earth. It's like a lithic-linguistic version of the pareidolia ubiquitous among rock collectors. To celebrate this spirit and simultaneously undermine its myopic optics, Pierre Jardin displayed his collection of rocks with round markings with an ambiguous message. On first glance, a viewer might verbalize it in the urban dictionary vernacular: 'sweet nothings,' i.e., 'awesome zero-shaped patterns.' On second thought, a viewer might catch the injunction against transposing geologic materials into human objects: 'sweet not-things,' i,e, 'nice random marks that are not a thing.' 

This conclusion provides a fitting conclusion to an examination of the expression "nothing is written in stone." The ambiguities of Pierre's petric poetics are consistent with a generalized geo-aesthetics. As Katherine Yusoff reminds us, these practices open “a space of experience that holds relations of nonhuman force between phenomena to blur boundaries and cross inhuman timescales. This untimely quality of aesthetics gives the possibility of crossing incommensurable material and temporal bodies…” (384). 

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