Alchemy

Two years ago I sponsored a project at Newport University's fashion department entitled 'Frocks from Rocks', with the hope of seeing how the mineral images could be used to create striking dresses. The latest student to explore the possibilities, Sophie Shardelow, graduated in June this year with a collection based on the theme of 'alchemy'. Inspired by the alchemists' dream of the transmutation of base metals into gold she created a series of 'looks' that began with a combination of knitwear and suede calculated to evoke the feeling of lead and culminated with a golden silk evening dress. To represent the process of transmutation she chose an image from Tiger's Eye to make the garments picture above - a stretch body suits made of printed lycra, a silk backless all-in-one, and a Grecian-style draped dress. Sophie is now working with me developing more ideas, so watch this space for developments!

Sagenitic sections

These mysterious looking formations are taken from what is known as sagenitic agate, which is characterised by straight needles that often radiate in hemispheres and are commonly found at the boundary between the agate and surrounding bedrock. Quite how these needles, let alone structures as intricate in cross-section as these, are incorporated into an agate is far from clear, but it seems likely that they form first in the cavity and are subsequently surrounded by the gel from which the agate forms. As an architect, I find these intricate examples uncannily reminiscent of extruded metal door and window frames!

Ledbury Library

Architype, one of the UK's leading architectural practices working at the forefront of sustainable design, have recently won a competition for a new library for the delightful Herefordshire town of Ledbury. Renowned for its medieval, timber box-framed buildings, Ledbury's historic character can also be gleaned from the fact that, when built, the library will feature the town's first lift! Architype's design is a thoroughly contemporary reinterpretation of the repeated gables found on several of the town's finest old buildings, and when you look a little closer you notice that it is intended to feature images from the earth database. I am looking forward to seeing how the project develops.

Calling all geoscientists!

One of our most beautiful Paesina Stone images has made it onto the front cover Geoscientist, the magazine of the UK’s Geological Society, with a selection of other images featured inside and introduced as follows: ‘Most geologists will remember the first timethey gazed down a microscope at a thin section and marvelled at nature’s hidden display of colour and texture. However, three years of undergraduate petrology, with its classification schemes and examinations, is bound to install a certain level of professional detachment towards the more aesthetic aspects of rocks and minerals.

The fact that rocks are studied for practical reasons, not just because they are nice to look at close-up, means that most people outside the profession have absolutely no idea of their hidden beauty. It sometimes takes someone from outside one’s own discipline to point out the obvious - seen close-up rocks and minerals, even those common ones like quartz and tourmaline that working geologist often take for granted, can be shockingly beautiful.’ Indeed they are, and I’m looking forward to seeing what delights await in two more batches from The Netherlands and another from my favourite US site, ‘Great Slabs’.

Dendrites from Germany

We’re planning to launch a collection of ‘images that look like plants but aren’t’, and this beautiful dendritic stone will certainly be amongst them. It arrived last week with several others from a German website – http://www.topgeo.de/ – and originates, like so many on the market, from the famous Solnhofen limestone, a fossil-rich Jurassic formation that lies between Nuremberg and Munich in Bavaria.
The plant-like branching patterns form through a process known as ‘Diffusion Limited Aggregation’: molecules of water-borne manganese move about randomly, and when they bump into each other, stick together. Repeated billions of times, various types of dendritic (‘leaf-like’, from the Greek) patterns emerge. These are amongst the most universal patterns in nature, at every scale from blood vessels to continental river drainage systems. There’s a book about them due out in September by the excellent science-writer, Philip Ball, the last of a trilogy based on his earlier book ‘The Self-made Tapestry’ – I’ve got that and the two that have already been published, ‘Shapes’ and ‘Flows’, and 'Branches' is a snip as a pre-publication buy on Amazon!

Dutch delights

I’ve just bought a selection of new agates from http://www.rayer-minerals.com/, the site of a lifelong Dutch collector, Henk Rayer. He has, he tells me, ‘a basement full of rocks’, including many from European countries – Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands – which are scarcely represented amongst the Formations images. One of his specialities, still well represented on the site, used to be drawings of clowns dressed in agate costumes – perhaps I should try to interest the next touring circus to come to Cardiff in some digitally printed fabric!
Both the images above come from agates found in a gravel pit at Arcen in The Netherlands. The brilliant red, hematite-dappled one is a greatly enlarged passage a few millimetres across on the original specimen, while the other must pack more colour changes into a few centimetres than any almost any agate I’ve scanned: I have a feeling it’s going to find its way onto silk at the earliest opportunity.
More than happy with the quality of Henk’s materials I’ve ordered some unique materials from him – a set of eight large cabochons commissioned from a Russian polisher using very rare agate from Kazakhstan. Needless to say, I’ll be posting some images from them at the earliest opportunity.

A world in a grain of sand

It was great to see a presentation of agate images from the website on http://geology.com/ this week and while browsing the home page I noticed a book I hadn’t come across before. Entitled A Grain of Sand it features extraordinary images by the author, Dr Gary Greenberg, taken with a 3D light microscope he developed and patented – you can find out more at his website http://www.sandgrains.com/.
It has been estimated that there are 48,000 billion billion grains of sand on earth and, true to the maxim that Nature never repeats herself, no two are exactly alike. But just how unalike is the real revelation of the book. Sand grains vary according to the rock they are derived from and the extent and nature of erosion they have undergone – the archetypal round grain of quartz is typically the product of several cycles of erosion over a billion years. Biological materials such as shells, diatoms and foraminifera also form a significant element in many sands, adding greatly to the microscopic variety of form and colour.
The centrepiece of the picture above looks like just the sort of thing I would like to scan. It’s made of chabazite, a glassy member of the zeolite family which, like many of the most beautiful minerals, are silica-based. The only snag is that this specimen is a mere 1/4mm across – not much larger than some of the specks of polishing powder I remove digitally as impurities! With Dr Greenberg’s book as stimulation, it is easy to join William Blake in imagining ‘a world in a grain of sand’.

Laguna agate

Most of the agate images on the website are made from Brazilian material. Recently, however, I decided to venture into the more expensive world of collector-quality specimens, amongst which Mexican agates loom large. Most come from Chihuahua, the largest of Mexico’s thirty-one states and reputedly home of the eponymous, diminutive breed of dog. Mexican agates were first documented in 1895, but it wasn’t until some fifty years later that a few American collectors, travelling a newly constructed highway, found small agate nodules close to the road. They are now commercially mined and prized by collectors and jewellery makers worldwide.
With the exception of the celebrated Crazy Lace Agate, which is featured on the cover of the Formations book that is for sale on the website and forms in cracks of an older Cretaceous limestone, Mexican agates are found in volcanic rocks from 38 to 44 million years old. Each variety is named after a nearby ranch, hacienda, or – like the Laguna agate shown here – a railway station. Laguna agates are famed for their fine colour banding and the exquisitely delicate detail shown above is an enlargement of an area only 1cm (3/8”) wide. It was bought from the website Beautiful Agates and happily, given its tiny size, required minimal ‘cleaning’.

Radiant House

My fascination with rocks, minerals and fossils began almost by chance some five years ago when I scanned a large ammonite. But chance is rarely as random as it seems.
When I built Radiant House at the FutureWorld exhibition in Milton Keynes in 1994, I conceived the design as a ‘brick-walled garden’ made habitable by a plywood aerofoil roof that had, so to speak, ‘flown in’ from Finland, its airborne character emphasised by floating its 5.5 tonnes on structural glass – a challenge magnificently met by the engineer Mark Lovell. The site is underlain by the Oxford Clays seams and to emphasise the connection between the handmade bricks and clay I decided to visit the brickworks and press replicas of ammonites found in the Oxford Clays into a few bricks – leading some visitors to say that they hadn’t realised fossils were found in bricks!
Friends were convinced the house would prove unsaleable: who would live in a house held up by glass?, they asked. Well, it sold, and re-sold, in less than two weeks each time, and now I’ve received an email out of the blue from a couple who said they ‘fell in love’ with the house at the exhibition and think that they might finally have the resources to commission a new one. I’m hoping they have, because we can not only refine the design but also, thanks to the earth images and digital manufacturing, make the tiles I dreamt of for the bathrooms. Whereas the impressed ammonites tie the walls to the earth below, the bathrooms will be altogether more ‘cosmic’, places to ponder what lies beyond the vaulted sky.

Maury Mountain Moss Agate

Buying on the Internet can be a hazardous business. It’s hard enough to tell if an interesting image lurks in a mineral in the hand, and judging on screen is doubly difficult. The arrival of a new package is usually heralded by a demand for VAT from HM Customs and Excise, but sometimes they slip through – the process seems almost random although I’m sure it shouldn’t be!
I buy a lot of material from a site called Great Slabs, most of it known as ‘rough’, ie unpolished. They wet the specimens with water to take photographs to show online but for scanning I use Johnson’s Baby Oil. It brings out the colour and detail, but is hard to apply in a perfectly even coat – when the scans pop up on screen I often discover areas of different thickness, which subtly changes the colours and means it’s back to the oil and a re-scan. Microscopic bubbles are also a pest – a few can be removed digitally, but they often necessitate a second (or third…) scan.
The latest batch from Great Slabs contained several pieces of Maury Mountain Moss Agate. I was attracted to this material – which comes from a mountain in Oregon – by its lovely name, and also because ‘moss’ generally indicates fine textures. Just how interesting any one specimen will prove is complete pot luck – it’s a ‘God is in the details’ material, its intricacies all but invisible to the eye, and generally best for fabrics rather than images. This image (double click on it to see full screen) is an enlargement of an area just under 4cm square and it might be worth trying on the website: the colours are wonderfully subtle and varied – I find the lavender especially beautiful and haven’t encountered it in this agate before. To me, it evokes the colours and textures of a coral reef.