Crystalline and Geological Forms
Art and design that echo crystals, minerals, strata and rock formations, or that use real mineral growth as material.
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About
Faceted crystals, banded agate and layered cliffs have drawn artists as examples of order produced by nature. Chinese scholars collected eroded limestone 'scholar's rocks' for contemplation, and the Florentine pietre dure workshops chose jaspers and patterned stones whose markings resemble landscapes. Caspar David Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (about 1818) gives geology the weight of a spiritual subject, and in the 1910s Bruno Taut and other Expressionist architects dreamed of glittering crystal buildings as symbols of renewal.
Since the 1960s the interest has often become literal. Robert Smithson worked with rock salt, mirrors and mineral deposits, and his Spiral Jetty (1970) sits in a lake whose salt crusts its basalt. Roger Hiorns filled a condemned London flat with blue copper sulphate crystals in Seizure (2008). Look for angular facets, stratified layers or surfaces that seem to have grown rather than been made.