This page documents an ongoing project that started with looking around me for something very ‘ordinary’ to investigate. I have a little casita on my son’s farm on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua, which is formed of two volcanos. Volcanos are ‘ordinary’ there.
I started by making a video of the nearest rock and found the depths of my ignorance. I have always found that drawing an object helps me to understand it, so I drew the rock at about half life-size (2 metres x 0.7 metres) in ink, using text that describes the information I found out from my research. I then created two books: one which reproduces all my questions, and one that acts as a key to the drawing, listing the sentences that form the drawing.
Elements of the rock, such as the Signature Spider and the tree seedling, that are not integral to its formation are drawn in pencil on Japanese paper and adhered to the drawing.
This is the starting video:
The books that describe the process from ignorance to some level of understanding are shown in the following video…
You may spot places where I started to write about how tired I was of writing!!