A long, long time ago, boiling lava filled with explosive gases bombarded cool sand and water near the west edge of what is today the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, Canada. If CNN or Al Jazeera had been there with camcorders, what a fiery, thunderous docudrama they would have made!
Today, the eye meets only the silent remnants: bizarre frozen beasts, gargoyles half of sand and half of lava, grotesque faces, giant severed limbs, sandstone cities riddled with holes.
The tides have rounded off the edges. Sand has filled in gaps. During the brief summer season, children play amidst these mute monsters, dogs run, people picnic. In about an hour, the photographer starts to feel normal in this rocky Guernica.
My mind was troubled by these images, but also comforted. The lava left its permanent marks, but the sand and the water ultimately prevailed. Like a bombed ruin or a downed jet preserved for posterity, these monstrous stones are harmless now.
All around the base of these freakish monuments of yesteryear, myriads of familiar little stones were busily rolling and rubbing the rough edges off. I happened across one stretch of these social stones at a perfect moment: the sun had risen but had not yet cleared the ridge, and the tide had uncovered them but they still glistened.
I hope that you, too, draw strength and comfort from these images.
About Hornby Island
For several years, I kept silence about the location where I took these images. My local hosts were long-time year-round residents and didn’t want any more tourists and sightseers jamming into the place in the brief summer season. During the season, the island’s population multiplied by a factor of ten; drinking water became in short supply, septic systems overflowed, and the roads glutted up with traffic. No more publicity, thank you! That was in 2004.
In today’s depressed economic climate, I rather think the island could use a little boost. And so, for what it may be worth, I’m unveiling the secret location. It is a well-known, much beloved summer destination, noted for its many painters, sculptors, and other artists: Hornby Island. It’s located a few hours northwest of Vancouver BC, in the Strait of Georgia.
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In addition to a year-round population of artists and craftspeople, Hornby offers many natural charms: lovely beaches (including one where clothing is deprecated), stunning sunsets, birds, fish, etc. But you can have much of that elsewhere. What’s striking here — and not found on the adjacent Denman Island — is the rocks.
As an amateur photographer, I like rocks. They don’t flutter away the instant before your lens is in focus, like birds do. They don’t flitter and sway in the breeze, like flowers. Their expressions aren’t mercurial, like people’s smiles. Like the lady in Boston who declined to travel because she was already there, rocks stay put. You only have to worry about the photons. For that, I am grateful, and I show my appreciation to them by doing their portraits.
A friend of mine, returning from a safari in Africa, showed off his snapshots of elephants, lions, gazelles, zebra and other cliches. When I reciprocated with my gallery of stones from Hornby, he gaphumped dismissively, “Oh, rocks!” Shame on him. These rocks have far more power, drama, and pathos than any gaggle of pachyderms in a wildlife rez.
Why Artists Come Here
It doesn’t take long to see why so many artists have taken up residence here. Nature herself has set the example, scattering her masterful artistry all around, challenging mortals to imitation.
Sculptural Figures
The impact of superheated gases and boiling lava on cold water created a sculpture gallery that no human maker of public art could hope to equal in ten lifetimes, and some of it is X-rated. This gallery now lies scattered all over the island, exposed to the elements and in some cases to human abuse. Unless an enormous, costly and no doubt impossibly controversial effort is made to collect these pieces and mount them in something like a museum setting, they will be gone forever in a matter of decades.
Etchings and Friezes
Intriguing etchings and built-up surfaces spell a story of violent expansion, sudden cooling, and an eon of erosion. Some of the etchings say “HI” — so if you want to believe in alien landings a million years ago (aliens who spoke English), then here’s grist for your mill.
Nature as Painter
Nature not only sculpts and etches, she paints. She favors a rather heavy impasto technique and her palette leans toward the earth tones. In her painterly philosophy, she’s not a naturalist or a realist, but some kind of abstractionist.
In the Gallery Aisles: Social Stones
On the wet slopes and in the cracks of this bizarre volcanic gallery lives a mass of newer and more normal stones … well-rounded, you might almost say. All different compositions and colors, they’ve rubbed against one another so long that they’ve lost their hard edges and form complex, beautiful, and ever shifting mosaics. I chanced on one field of these stones at a perfect moment: the tide had just subsided, leaving them wet, and the sun had just risen but not yet climbed over the hills. The stones shone in vivid, saturated colors without the assistance of Photoshop.
Postscript
Imagination involves the projection of one’s own feelings and scenarios onto an animal or object. We can then feel empathy with the imagined actions and emotions of the target of our projection. This mental movie-making works best if you see with the eyes of a child.
When you saw the distorted faces and bodies of the sculpture gallery, did something inside you resonate? Did some of the rocks make you smile? Did some make you want to cry? Do you sometimes feel torqued and cracked like some of these figures?
Did you wonder whether someone posed in the nude for these sculptures of breasts, belly buttons, buns, and other parts of the anatomy?
Did you wonder if little people lived in these cities of arches, tunnels, and catacombs?
Did you wonder what animal made the tracks, or left its skeleton; or did you ask whether an alien had landed and left a message (“HI”) when you looked at the etchings and friezes?
Did you identify with one or another of the shiny, lovable Social Stones? Did you say, “This rock is me!”?
I certainly did, on all counts, and it was this emotional vibrancy, as much as the visual excitement and aesthetic appeal of the scene, that got me out of my tent before sunrise and kept me taking pictures.
Like the world that made these stones, ours is an age of violent conflicts. Many of us are, or will be, stamped by manmade cataclysms more widespread and disastrous than the natural collision between hot lava and cool water that made these bizarre figures.
But there the parallels end. Much as we can identify with stones, we are not them. We can admire and emulate their strength, their diversity, their complexity, their beauty, their survival powers. But unlike stones, we have choices. Unlike them, we have something to say about our futures.
Guernica is a great work of art. But, as an artist and a human being, my goal is to live in a world where the inspiration for future Guernicas will not arise.
– M.A. Nicolaus
