Lift Off Festival, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

materials: wax crayon, ink, paper, plywood, temporary fencing

When we think of the word ‘grow’, we might think of plants, gardens, forests, or the growth changes experienced within the child to adult journey. This artwork explores a less-commonly considered idea of growing; the slow crystallization and mineral growth involved in solid rock formation.

Kunanyi’s its silent mass bears witness to the daily lives, past, present and future of the community nestled around it. This beautiful mountain is comprised of dolerite, created through a process known as intrusive igneous rock formation, beginning deep within the Earth’s crust, where molten magma travels and accumulates in pockets or chambers closer to the earth’s surface. Over time this magma undergoes a process of slow crystallization, which results in the growth of mineral crystals which interlock with one another, creating a matrix of hexagonal rock columns, locally known on Kunanyi as the Organ Pipes.

This artwork engaged with the unique hexagonal columnar forms of the mountain, and the extraordinary and surprising crystals that have grown to slowly form them, inviting participants to reflect on the unseen magic of these rock formations, macro and micro scales of time and landscape, and our relation to them.

After viewing a range of reference material in the workshop tent, participants were asked “If you were a crystal, what shapes would you form, what colours would you be?”, and were then invited to make their own unique ‘crystals’ from a wax-resist process of image making, to contribute to a growing ‘Organ Pipe’ artwork that accumulated over the festival week.

acknowledgements: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; University of Tasmania, School of Earth Sciences