Starring in obsidian

When Sian Lloyd, ITV's celebrated weathercaster, was invited to host the annual motor sports awards held at the Yacht Club in Monte Carlo shortly before Christmas, she decided she wanted something special to wear. 'It’s a very glitzy, high end event,' she said 'and I needed a really spectacular dress for the occasion.'
Rather than go to one of her favourite designers she chose to challenge the fashion students at Newport University to design and make something suitably eye-catching - and to ensure a unique result she selected a silk satin digitally printed with a scan of obsidian from the Earth Images collection. The patterns in obsidian - or volcanic glass - retain the fluidity of their formation and worked perfectly with the classic lines of the winning design.

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.