GEOLOGICAL TIME

While taking one of my frequent walks through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains near my home north of Atlanta, I came across two elegant, perfectly placed boulders on the trail. One was perched on top of the other with the authority of a Serra sculpture, or a finely crafted architectural monument. At that point I asked myself, "I wonder how long these two megaliths have been in this position, touching, and how did they get here. After doing some research on this Kennesaw Mountain and similar local natural monuments of granite, most of what I found consisted of detailed information about Civil War battles that had been fought there. But, after more digging into the question, "what created the Appalachian Mountains?" - I found a wealth of scientific literature on the topic. The answer is related to the movement of continents over hundreds of millions of years. This series was made to be a metaphor and homage to that unobservable process. It is also reflective of the poetic device of synecdoche, the idea of using a part to represent the whole. In this way, in my mind, these pictures are also connected to the structure of Japanese Zen gardens that so powerfully evoke this idea of nature being something that can not be possessed but only contemplated, so close but so far away.