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WITH HETTIE JUDAH
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023).
WITH HETTIE JUDAH
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023).
WITH HETTIE JUDAH
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023).
WITH HETTIE JUDAH
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
JF - How did Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones come about?
HJ: I’m very lucky in my work that I get to spend time with an awful lot of artists and I followed their lead. Artists are incredibly sensitised to big cultural shifts and to subjects that quite often then enter the mainstream a few years later. I think if you watch what the artists are interested in, it generally gives you quite a good guideline through life. A few years ago, artists began to really explore deep time and with that came stones and fossils, which seemed to intersect with many artworks exploring expressions of power, colonialism and extractive industries. An example of this is Pio Abad's amazing series of works that he made in relation to Imelda Marcos's jewellery collection.
JF – From this place, artists have begun to explore more-than-human intelligence, which so far has largely excluded the mineral kingdom, but perhaps this is the beginning of a cultural acceptance of the myriad life forms that can be part of the conversation. We’ve come a long way from thinking of plants as inanimate objects, maybe stones are next.
HJ - Yes, I really wanted to push against the idea that stone is dead matter. I’m always trying to remind people about the connections between stone and life, whether that's prehistoric life or life in our own time. One thing that really was driven home to me from the more geological bits of the book is what an enormous proportion of the mineral world has at some point passed through some kind of digestive system at the very least, if not being part of a living thing at some point.
JF – I think one way of understanding this is through sound. I’ve recorded biodata frequencies from volcanic rocks and meteorite much in the same way that I record the plants.
HJ – Lithophones are the stones that have this amazing reverberating quality. In the book, the references to lithophones are dolerite, which form the inner circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. There has always been contention about why people would bother to drag these stones all the way from South Wales, because you've got plenty of stones on Salisbury Plain, but one interesting theory, documented in Stone Age Eyes and Ears is that the stones have a particular resonant quality to them, and that they were part of a much, much older standing stone circle in the Preseli Hills. Some of these stones, if you strike them just right, have got this amazing reverberation, and there are various villages in that area with place names that relate to lithic resonance. Maenclochog “Welsh for ringing or bell stones” is a local village that “reportedly had a pair of bluestones acting as church bells up until the eighteenth century,” the local quarry was called “Bellstone”.
There's also a story about Chinese Gongshi 供石, which are also known as scholar’s rocks. This originally came from people striking stalactites to create bells, which as you can imagine, in a cave, would create a most extraordinary reverberation. The finest example of Gonshi is Lingbishi 灵璧石, which is a fine pale limestone, and the best of these have a resonant quality, and these were used to create stone bells and gongs. So we see the resonant qualities of stones across cultures.
JF – How are Gonshi/Scholar’s rocks qualified?
HJ - It's to do with the form and the different ways that your eyes can travel around the form, the kinds of apertures and routes in. Then there are slightly more esoteric qualities, like a quality of fascinating ugliness that the prized ones have. Often, they are limestone because of the way that it erodes into these tormented forms, creating these spectacular shapes and strange rock formations and cliffs in the macro sense. You then get these smaller limestone formations that are prized as Gongshi and are quite often found in caves or buried in mud. I think it must be something to do with the strength and the tension of what's left after the erosion that makes those shapes particularly resonant as well.
JF – I really appreciate the reverence that the concept of Gongshi gives to these forms. It brings to mind the dragon stone at Avebury and the Dragon’s Eye cave in Lancashire.
HJ – Yes well, the famous standing stones come from parts of the UK that have got the much older rock formations, like the west coast of Scotland, Wales and the north of Cornwall. Here there are metamorphic rocks, which have got much more interesting and complex shapes. And they often erode in really strange ways, but then also because of their more tormented shapes, they quite often resemble turning figures or monsters. I think all of those stories that we have about trolls that turn to stone after the sun comes up or the merry maidens that have turned to stone because they were dancing on the Sabbath and so on, come from this. All of these very anthropomorphic stone shapes really come out of these quite interesting, tormented stone forms that allow us to indulge in a bit of pareidolia. If you think about the stones at Avebury, you can read so much into their surfaces as well, because they're all fretted and worn in these very interesting ways that suggest faces or monsters.
JF – Have you ever been to Stanton Drew Stone Circle in Somerset?
HJ – No I haven’t, but one of the areas that I used to walk a lot around there was the White Sheet Hill. It is a massive chalk formation and it's one of the oldest sites of European habitation in the British Isles and has a very important fort on the top of the hill. Very, very early settlers from Europe came up there and it’s thought to be one of the earliest of its kind, that then branched out into a new culture that formed Avebury and all of the Salisbury plain cultures.
JF – I’ll check it out and do go to Stanton Drew when you are next in the area, it’s off the beaten track and so hasn’t had the attention and traffic other places have, and as a ceremonial site it is comparatively unadulterated. It’s the third largest complex of standing stones in England and thought to be 4,500 years old. Did your research take you on any other interesting pilgrimages?
HJ - We did a few quite eccentric pilgrimages, and my poor long standing partner was dragged all over Ilkley Moor and obviously to Lyme Regis and various places. There are many places in the book beyond the British Isles of course, and I start the book in Istanbul, which is where I used to live with the Medusa Gorgon heads at the Sunken Palace or Basilica Cistern, created by Justinian in the sixth century. I was also really interested in the tension between science and religion in the 19th century.
JF – The book includes many tales of mythology and folklore, of alchemy with cinnabar and sulphur, and magic with obsidian scrying. Did you consider including mythological stones like the Philosopher’s Stone?
HJ - This was interesting because the book is a book about real stones and the publisher was clear on this, however I wanted to include the Philosopher’s Stone and other mythical stones like kryptonite, which I managed to touch on through tektonite. I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a European story. So there are two stories that are really rooted in alchemy and one is cinnabar and one is sulphur. Cinnabar is from the Asian alchemical tradition and sulphur touches more on European tradition. It’s also looking at the response of the enlightenment and the way that the enlightenment was very keen to squash any mysticism or ideas that matter had active properties to it in that way. Alchemical texts span thousands and thousands of years and the person we think of as the father of science in the UK, Issac Newton, was a self-proclaimed alchemist and very well learned in the practice. Alchemy was the roots of European chemistry and science in many ways and it’s impossible to separate the two as they really do enmesh.
JF – Yes, I think of alchemy as chemistry with soul. The alchemical practice was about reverence and the sacred. Ora et Labora – the laboratory was the place to pray and to work. The enlightenment pushed alchemy underground and separated notions of soul and spirit in the interests of matter alone.
HJ – It’s also very interesting thinking about where we use esoteric language now as well, and it tends not to be science, it tends more to be art. If you read a standard gallery press release these days, it’s about as difficult to get into as a hermetic text I think these days.
JF – Exactly! Art does allow the space and the freedom to play within these ideas without having to get caught up in any belief systems. Art is of course alchemical in its ability to transform states and in that the inner journey of the alchemist is integral to the relationship.
HJ – What I loved about the cinnabar story is that it illustrates this connection between alchemy and art. It is about a tradition called pitchwai painting in India and the process that they go through with the stone-based pigments in order to use them to make these sacred paintings which are used as temple backdrops. It's a very, very ancient painting technique and it has connections to Buddhist painting techniques and there's a lot of geometrical and colour symbolism in it, but it's also all done with very finely processed stone. And that whole long process of learning to grind the stone and turn it into the pigment for the painting is the kind of contemporary translation of the old alchemical processes. I think it's really fascinating.
JF – And pretty toxic with mercury involved! How is vermilion extracted from cinnabar? Are there examples of contemporary artists working with these processes?
HJ – Yes the mercury! Vermilion was made from grinding pure cinnabar up, which is still the process. They would also crush lapis lazuli and malachite to make blues and greens, and then various earth pigments as well, such as ochres. The reason that I started to research pitchwai painting was actually because of a contemporary artist called Olivia Fraser, who uses a lot of the same processes and techniques in her work, primarily working with malachite, but she also uses lapis lazuli, cinnabar and chalk from cliffs in Jaipur, which she grinds by hand.
Tanoa Sasraku did this extraordinary series of paintings where she was using the earth pigments from various different spots around the UK that were really important to her. It almost became like a kind of map of the British Isles but painted in its own pigments, which I thought was a really beautiful idea.
JF – What do you think the future of stones is, at least within the context of art and making. A resurgence has been brewing for a while now, and it feels like stones are going to have their time again.
HJ - I'm really hoping that there's a bit more kind of reverence for materials because I get really upset when I see quite thoughtless use of stone. And by that, I mean artists sending blocks of marble off to China to be carved into quite flippant works. They're almost kind of like a disposable commentary and when you think how old that stone is, and to do that to something that's been extracted from the earth and is so ancient just seems like such a waste. There’s also been a lot of interest in technofossils, which I think is going to be an ongoing interest. I think people continue to be really interested in geology, but also this idea that stone is not necessarily dead matter, that there is this kind of vibrancy to it as well. And I think that continues to enchant a lot of artists.
JF – Yes, but even when the intention is for the stones to be as living, magical artifacts, such as Marina Abramović’s Transitory Objects, it is still a deeply extractive process. Except in the case of land art, when there is minimal impact and room for co-authorship with nature.
HJ – Yes crystals are tricky, having become very popular as people are attracted to the idea of them having resonance and healing qualities, but along with the issue of extraction, it’s also very difficult to know for sure about their provenance.
JF – The traceability will hopefully become easier to access with time, but any kind of mining is very problematic. I’ve accumulated various precious stones over the years and this extraction piece has been disturbing me lately, so recently I felt to the return them to the earth.
HJ - There are going to be some really confused geologists in a couple of centuries!
JF – Ha! Yes there might well be. Speaking of the future, how have you managed to simplify this for a young audience in the children’s version of the book?
HJ – Yes it’s a large-format book for kids, illustrated by Jennifer N. R. Smith, which will be out next year. She’s a scientific illustrator with a very precise style, but also quite psychedelic, dreamy and intense. I just finished writing it quite recently and it's been really interesting thinking about how you translate quite profound geological processes down for a 10-year-old reader. There are 25 stories rather than 60, with the focus being more rooted in environmental concerns, like the story on black shale and fracking. There's a lot of foundational stuff that you need to be aware of before a lot of things make sense, so I’m working on a whole section of how the earth is constructed. It slightly blew my mind that the creation of the moon has only been explained during my lifetime, which is wild. There is so much about the planet that we are only just getting to grips with.
JF – Geology, like archaeology, has a bit of a reputation of being quite male-dominated, one part Indiana Jones, and one part rigid science caught up in outdated systems and theory. How do you see its future?
HJ - Well, historically it’s been a very male-led discipline. I really wanted to bring more female characters into the book, like Marie Tharp, and her work mapping the ocean floor. I wanted to acknowledge the role of women in geology and to hopefully make it not seem quite as forbidding. I mean, it's funny you say it's a very rigid area. I do think of geology as being quite a poetic science because so much is unknown and so much of it is speculative because you're looking at matter in the modern moment and trying to read the history of the world into it. It requires a lot of leaps of the imagination and a lot of poetical thinking as well.
Hettie Judah is a writer and curator. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, and writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine. Her writing on art can also be found in Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023).