Floating Worlds

Magma currents inwardly circle, floating land forms through global transformation in deep time.

Tasmania’s Nth/West area & the Grand Canyon (USA) rifted apart 1.5 Billion Years ago,

Floating Worlds is a visual narrative of the journeys of these landforms.

DEEPEST THANKS TO - Dr Jacqueline Halpin UTAS Geologist, Dr Pete Hay Academic and Poet & Emily Sheppard Musician. Many thanks also to the Bellendeena Small Grants Program for their financial assistance.

FLOATING WORLDS Catalogue essay by Dr Pete Hay

In the beginning… ‘In the beginning’ is how most ruminations such as these commence, and so it should be. In the beginning the deeps of the sea covered the earth. Can you imagine the very moment when the terrestrial realm reared out of the brine and announced itself?

Not the dawn of life – that was still to come. Rather, the dawn of rock. Can you imagine the tumult, The elemental rage, the surging chaos? Words like ‘ruinous’ and ‘cataclysmic’ were formed for this very moment.

‘The dawn of rock.’ I like that. Long before life, before the better-known supercontinents, Pangea and Gondwana, there was Nuna and there was Rodinia. We’re talking 1.8 billion years ago, give or take the odd million. Right up there with the first landmasses on the planet.

And here they are, right here on the island at the end of the earth. Well, they aren’t to be found at the more populous southern end of the island, but get yourself to Boat Harbour Beach on the North-West Coast, and start walking west along the shore to Rocky Cape. You are crossing the planet’s first landforms, rocks of which the closest known relatives are on the other side of the planet, in Colorado’s Grand Canyon.

There are seven distinct types of rocks making up the Nuna-Rodinia cluster. You have just walked across one of these, Irby Siltstone, a Rodinian landform, and very hard going it was, the strata tilted, the edges sharp. Nuna was the older of the two supercontinents, and after it rifted apart Rodina formed from re-cohered pieces of the older supercontinent. Towards and beyond Rocky Cape, moving west, you cross from Rodinian times into still older Nuna remnants, the Detention Subgroup (at Rocky Cape) and Cowrie Siltstone (at Hellyer Beach and Cowrie Point), The ancient-beyond-imagining rock then outcrops on the West Coast near the Arthur River, with four sites south from there. The most spectacular manifestation is at Sarah Anne Rocks and nearby Couta Rocks. These are also the oldest deposits, and feature spectacular black and white banding.

In the beginning… unstable times, rock grinding on rock, magma surging forth, a time of making and unmaking. In our present time there is an animal with a spectacularly evolved brain. It has worked all this out. It has constructed a tool to make the working out possible – we call it science. But this clever animal has also constructed another, more ineffable optic through which to view the world. It’s called art, and it proceeds by creative intuition. That there is a rock as old as time lodged here within our island of otherwise recent creation is a serendipity irresistible to scientists. We would expect, too, that it would be irresistible to artists.

And so it has proven.

I’ve long been in Julie Stoneman’s corner. Hers, I think, is a sublime talent. A talent well suited to the task of creatively engaging with old, old, Nuna and Rodiniastone.

Her task is to capture the riotously uncontainable – tumult its very self. She wants to paint the convection currents deep within the planetary mantle, that force for geological instability, that force that moves the tectonic plates about. She wants us to look at her work and see the movement and the power that drive everything. She seeks to convey a sense of vast chunks of rock being thrown around, and of roaring flows of obliterating magma. So she uses a hot and vivid palette (even when deploying apparently cool colours), and a mode of application that is as muscular as the planetary processes themselves. She throws the stuff around – metallic inks – replicating in her chosen medium, the forces of construction and destruction that have given us, right here, our own unique geology.

But the planet aged, of course. The dynamism receded. The tempestuous earth cooled, gentled. And Julie’s artistic renditions cool, gentle. From the elemental chaos within the earth’s molten crust she turns her artist’s eye to solidified forms. She gives us the Tasmanian landscapes of ancient Nuna and Rodinia rock. These are landscapes of the recognisable, and here, as her medium shifts, shellac ink is to the fore, with rocksalt. The black and white stripes of the Couta and Sarah Rocks are foregrounded, brought into impressive focus.

Tasmania’s ancient geology is characterised by dramatic folding, often with sharp, uplifted surfaces almost impossible to walk upon. Julie Stoneman’s art captures this in dramatic emphasis, and adds to it a colourist’s emotional saturation – ‘emotional’ in the sense of how the forces of deep time would see themselves (if they could). It is a triumph, the fulfilment of a project of breathtaking ambition, and of first-rank importance to our understanding of this passionate island. An island, as we now know, that is old beyond old.

Dr Pete Hay