Painting with Rocks
The mosaic I made as part of my special studies!
This past year (my junior year) I did a year long special studies with my Geosciences minor advisor, Professor Glumac, where we designed, researched and built a stone mosaic based on the traditional Italian art form called Pietre Dure (hardstone) but using modern technology and softer stones.
This project came out of a class I took with Professor Glumac my sophomore year called Archaeological Geology of Rock Art and Stone Artifacts (Arch Geo), where we looked at how humans have used stone throughout history and how the geological processes and properties of each rock affected how humans used them as tools but also as art. One of the cool things about Smith is that community members can sit in on classes. In Arch Geo, we had a retired architect and fine furniture craftsman, Silas, in our class. For one of the projects Silas presented on Pietre Dure, the traditional Florentine artform (Florence Italy is most famous for this technique) of making mosaics out of very thin pieces of hardstone inlaid together. Pietre Dure is nicknamed painting in stone due to the incredibly detailed images that are created. As a Studio Art major and Geosciences minor, this class opened a whole new world of ideas about how to look at art and combine two of my passions. I was hooked. I wanted to keep exploring these ideas. I went to Professor Glumac and asked to do a special studies with her combining art and Geo. She had been chatting with Silas already about how cool it would be to try to make a mosaic, Silas does marquetry (inlay woodworking) which is a very similar concept as Pietre Dure. As soon as I mentioned what I wanted to do she suggested we work with Silas, and so, my special studies was born.
I spent all fall designing my mosaic, collecting materials, and finding the right stones to mimic the painting-like quality of Pietre Dure. Building a traditional bow saw; learning how to translate my design into the program that the waterjet could read and cut my stones; prototyping my design using a laser cutter and then operating the waterjet that lives in Smith College’s Center for Design and Fabrication to cut all my pieces. I got to appreciate how hard and how much skill went into the traditional methods! I, then, had to glue together all 16 pieces of my design and hand polish the whole mosaic. And when that didn’t get it smooth enough we took it to a stone manufacturer in Agawam, MA where they used a diamond polisher to get that perfect shine!
Silas and I clamping everything together after we glued it.
Learning how to use the waterjet with Eric of the Design and Fabrication Center
Silas, left, me, and Professor Glumac at Santo DeSpirt after we got help with the final polish.
In the spring, I spent the semester making thin sections of all my rocks. I had to cut each one down to a very thin slice of rock, glue it to a glass slide, and polish it them down so you could see through them when looked under the microscope. I used 12 different kinds of marbles, limestones, and serpentinites in my mosaic. We made thin sections of each stone in order to learn more about their specific geological properties. I learned where in the world each stone was from, how and when it formed, and got to discover some really cool fossils.
This is a foraminifera fossil from my favorite rock! Before we made thin sections, we knew very little about this black limestone that forms the beak of my hummingbird. When we looked at the thin section under magnification we saw that it was full of foraminifera fossils, a kind of marine single celled planktonic organism that has a chalky shell. This was my favorite one because I think it looks like a hat!
I presented my work at Smith’s Celebrating Collaborations, a day in April where students present the independent work they’ve been doing all year with faculty from across the college. I’m super excited to be taking my poster to the Geological Society of America’s annual conference this fall in Phoenix, AZ where Professor Glumac and I will be presenting and taking part in sessions around communicating Geology through art.
Me with my finished mosaic presenting in front of my poster at Collaborations 2019