Y Gostrel

i Pam, er cof am Steve Petro

Onid o law i law

y daw pob dim

yn y diwerdd!

Syllu or gostrel, 

malachit a jasbis,

a'n gleiniau'n gyno.

Saif ar y pontran

yn dysf i lafw

un a'i gariod at garreg.

Ei thoeio a'i ddwylo

ei choethi ii'w harddwch,

sychu'r llwch

a'i naddu'n lan. 

Cyn ei gollang

yn rhydd eto,

o draeth bywyd

y draeth cyn troi'n 

eiddo i arall.

Fel heddiw

-- o law i law 

 yn daw ein dydd.

The Costrel

to Pam, in memory of Steve Petro

Isn't everything

handed down

in the end?

I gaze at a bottle 

malachite and jasper,

intricate stones.

It sits above the fireplace,

witness to the labour

of one man's love for stone.

Diminution refined

in beauty,

sweeping aside the ash

clean hewn.

Before releasing

it free again--

from the beach of life

it arrived, turned

for another to possess 

today--

from hand to hand, comes our day.

        by Menna Elfyn (written 15. iv. 2013)

               Costrel, for those who don't know--like me--is a word in biblical Welsh word for "keeping wine." My friend Menna Elfyn wrote this poem for me in memory of my father, after I gave her one of his "snuff bottles." Menna is the foremost poet writing in the Welsh language today--and one of the most translated poets in Europe. My dad's "snuff bottles" are hand-carved from the mineral specimens he collected all his life. The ones pictured above are of malachite with a jade top, and jasper with a jade top. I put "snuff bottles" in quotes, because while they're modeled on antique Chinese snuff containers (another passion of his), they aren't hollow, so they aren't actually useable as bottles. They're beautiful objects without a purpose. They're art.

               The bottle I gave Menna has a malachite base and a jasper top. These two

are made from pebbles collected on the beach at Cape Cod, polished on a grinding wheel, and sport rhodocrosite tops.

               In my dad's files I found a hand-written description on yellow legal-pad paper of how he made the bottles. Here's what he wrote: "The stone bottles were made first by blocking them out on a 6" homemade diamond saw; then by grinding into bottle shapes using 100 and 200 grit 6" grinding wheels; then sanding and polishing using 220, 400, and 600 grit wet sanding paper and two homemade sanding wheels; then they were then polished using cerium oxide on hard felt wheels.

               Most of the stone bottles are not drilled out (several were drilled about one half-inch deep); the tops are glued on and they are not removable (except for the few which are drilled, as noted above).

               The stone bottles were prepared from the following list of minerals: chrysoprase, pink quarts, carnelian, sodalite, pale purple amethyst, striped jasper, agatized palm wood, yellow tiger eye, laboradorite, red jasper, jade, moss agate, malachite, rhodochrosite, brown obsidian, and calcite (fluorescent red, from Franklin, NJ)....

                May the reader of this document, sometime in the future, have as much fun interpreting it as I had in making and acquiring this collection. Good luck!"

Stephen Petro

This final group, from left to right, is made from a beach pebble with an agate top; tiger's eye with a pale amethyst top; and aventurine with an agate top.

Thanks to both Steve and Menna for the beauty.

If petrographs were a poem, they might sound like this one by Mary Oliver, from her new collection A Thousand Mornings

 Poem of the One World

This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this

the one world

 we all belong to

where everything

 sooner or later

is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

Red River Beach, Harwich Port, 
Cape Cod

The Big Jetty

A Tribute to my Pop

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AfterShadows, A Grand Canyon Narrative

by

Pamela Petro

2011-12
  
This image and word series stems from my artist's residency at the Grand Canyon in Jan-Feb, 2011. The four large text panels recount the evolution and inspiration of the narrative sequence. It will be available in book form as well as a limited edition print portfolio.
 

AfterShadows, A Grand Canyon Narrative, 2011-12


I saw absence at the Grand Canyon before I saw presence: Black, blank rivers of shadow cast by the Canyon’s garden of rock formations. More than the spectacular strata, deep time, for me, lay in the shadows—shadows that possessed powers of instant erosion, creating negative space, streaming like tributaries of the night sky down to the Colorado River.

I came to read the shadows as a great sundial—time displayed vertically, pivoting horizontally throughout the day—and told time by their presence. I took their pictures and recorded the hours at which the most iconic shadows were cast.

After returning to the East Coast I printed these immense rivers of blackness on small white beach pebbles collected along the Bay of Fundy, which possesses—in our eon, at least—the strongest, most erosive tides on earth. (The images on the pebbles are actual photographs, printed in the darkroom after I coated the rocks in liquid photo emulsion.)

I then arranged the pebbles in sequences: A “Canyon Clock” that told time throughout a winter’s day at the Grand Canyon; a “World Clock,” in which the pebbles represented different locations on the globe at the same moment.

The next step was to photograph the printed pebbles (“petrographs”) against background elements representing different phases of the Canyon’s development—ash, seawater, vegetation, mud , sand, and beach rocks—and at different times of day.

We all carry shadows, according to Carl Jung: Earlier, interior parts of ourselves we don’t express. What, I wondered, would the earth hide in its shadows? The images in my Grand Canyon Series visualize a rapproachment between questions like that—the stuff of human wonder—and the physical reality of our environment, in which our lives are cupped. Ashes to ashes. Pebbles to sand to sea to ash to rock to us—and back again.

Medium/Processes: Traditional photography; Liquid Light on Beach Pebbles; Digital Photography.