Stones
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This is series of photographs I took on a beach in Del Mar, California.
There is an interesting competition for attention between the shadows, whose direction is determined by the time of the day and the day of the year we were having this picnic, and the direction of the most recent swoop of the surf, which has left traces on the sand around the stone.
The black lines are an ominous reminder of an oil spill years ago. (I’m not certain it actually took place, but it’s highly likely, given the accelerating history of environmental disasters in the past decades).
The theme and the featured image cry for an opening line like “Ever since I was a little boy/girl . . .” but I look hard into my past and find no hint of the origin of such an obsession.
There are no round stones of this size in the region I grew up in, only brittle material with fractured faces. Some of it slag, from iron smeltering.
I once found a rock tumbler in the garbage on the street, which could have done the job, although the stones would have been miniscule compared to the ones in Del Mar. The battery-powered electric motor still worked, but I never put anything into the tumbling cylinder. Instead it became part of my conceptual collection of conceptual art, not unlike the Fountain Project duly documented here.
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