This water meter happens to fall right in the path of the wall. It wasn’t possible (or advisable) to move it, so I went around it. In the next image, you can see how little room I had to work with below the cover. I use a few spoonfuls of mortar to help bond the smallest stones immediately below the opening. It was great fun to build, but very time-consuming.
I made this handout to accompany the fossil floor. The family has four kids and I hope that the floor piques their curiosity about geology. Maybe this ‘story’ will get hung up in a cabinet and forgotten, to be discovered many years from now, yellowed with age, when someone else takes ownership of the house.
The wall already had some nerd cred; at one end I installed a small chunk of pegmatite that reminded me of the ice cave from the first Superman movie. It’s the wrong color, but the huge crystal structures evokes primal memories of Krypton. A couple of hours later, as I was laying the cap course and listening to Chris Hardwisk’s The Nerdist Podcast in my headphones, renowned author Neil Gaiman compared writing to the art and practice of making a drystone wall. I do some of both and see the parallels.
I often leave things behind in a wall. Usually they’re small tokens, like marbles and such. Since I still have quite a bit to build here, I’ve decided to leave a time capsule in the depths of this wall. I have an old flash drive that’s of no use to me, so I’m going to load it up with a couple of Nerdist Podcasts, some of the music I’ve been building to and a few other things, and stash it in the wall.
In April I got a phone call from the Art in Public Places Trust (APPT) in Gainesville, Florida announcing that I had been selected to complete a public art project. I am going to build a mosaic stone floor in a courtyard adjacent to a new building on the campus of the Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU). In May I visited the site and met the APPT board and toured the campus/construction site. Back home, I set about drawing.
During my visit to Gainesville, I found myself drawn to the local stone. The area limestone is dense with the fossilized remains of ancient sea creatures. I took pictures of fossil-rich boulders and sketched from them, looking for forms and relationships that might translate into a patio surface. My source photographs and fossil books opened up interesting explorations, but always led me to the same place. By the very nature of seashells, their forms are instantly recognizable and iconic. I strived to sidestep that iconic nature, for fear of creating a floor that looked like wallpaper. The APPT encouraged me to explore natural shapes, but avoid graphic depiction. The seashells were too graphic, too decorative, too obvious.
The design I proposed and was recently approved features a central spiral element, drawn from my fossil sketches. I have shattered the form with other shapes, lines that intersect it and obscure it. It is a form emerging from a background. Like the process of discovering a seashell embedded in an ancient rock, so the nautilus shape emerges to the eye slowly. The intersecting lines suggest water steadily wearing away the matrix surrounding the fossil, stone slowly giving up its secrets. I hope to capture that same magic of discovery for people first venturing upon my mosaic.
