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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.
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.
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.
