volunteer observation:
These are ceramic flowers and they need to be planted. Not necessarily into earth. You can think of planting as in to place it somewhere it'll remain for a while and have a purpose in being— like planting mics to record something secretly, or planting an idea in one's mind.
Now this is a ceramic flower, it's a stone flower, but it will still grow and change as a flower does, just on a different timescale. These guys here live on a deep time scale: “deep time is the concept of geological time that spans billions of years, far beyond the scale of human experience. It provides the temporal framework for understanding the formation and evolution of Earth, the development of life, and the slow-moving processes that shape planetary change” (wiki). To make these stone flowers i worked with minerals that took hundreds of thousands of years to form and a few years to process until they reached my hands where they became a human-made rock. A structural geologist Marcia Bjornerud in her book Timeness writes: "In my field, we think of rocks when they're deforming as extremely viscous fluids. They're solid, but they're flowing in the solid state and bending and changing shape in response to these stresses. That's rock mechanics, rock behavior. Rocks behave in certain ways in different pressure temperature conditions. And in our mind's eye and in quantitative models, we can sort of envision rocks in motion, rocks changing their shape, rocks reincarnating by recrystallizing into new forms."
So these are essentially deep time creatures and i am not a deep time creature so i’m curious in their lives. For this project i recruited a volunteering to help me observe them.
