Puddingstone
Everybody Needs A Rock is an ongoing project by jeweller Sae Honda.
For this project, she draws inspiration from a new kind of rock called ‘Plastiglomerate’ which contains plastic fragments.
This project aims to raise awareness of hidden value in the problematized matter. Honda collects plastic waste together with natural materials surrounding it. The collected materials are melted together into a unique, local artificial stone, and the results are refined by cutting and polishing.
Some of the works of this project are in the permanent collection of Rijksmuseum and Het Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Sae Honda
Puddingstone (written by Rutger Emmelkamp for the publication Everybody Needs A Rock)
In my hand I hold a piece of pink granite. Although my fingers are cold and stiff I manage a somewhat rhythmic finger movement and make it roll around smoothly. While looking closely I try to memorize its rugged surface, its mica reflectors, black granular intrusions and glacial striations as these details move around and away from me. I attempt to make a mental picture of the entire surface at once. I don’t manage but I enjoy the exercise. It makes me think of what Richard Sennett wrote about the capacity of us humans to hold objects in our hands and turn them round. It gave us the capacity to visually orient ourselves in a mountainous landscape. The awareness that the mountain actually has a backside. What is out of sight does not cease to exist. This capacity expanded our territory and our memory. The stone as a first tool for navigation. I try to imagine how the lines that curve around the stone would look if I would stand on its surface. How the perspective would be. The depth of the dimples, the height of the bumps and the shape of its horizon. As I stand there on the rock I hold in my hand. I look down at its surface and wonder what’s inside.
Mining is an impatient business. It gets to the bottom of things and gets there fast. It digs through aeons of time and surfaces devastating anachronisms. It’s only because it’s too hot down there that humans don’t dig to where diamonds are being formed. That is not necessary either. Diamonds have been brought to the surface from the mantle in a rare type of magma called kimberlite and erupted at a volcanic vent called a diatreme. Mining is a vertical affair, harvesting a horizontal. Harvesting celebrates the very ends of symbiotic and logistic chains resulting in produce that is ‘ripe’ and offers itself in the space we inhabit. At the very surface of the earth mining and harvesting are much alike. If patient enough, diamonds could be harvested.
An edgy shard of a bicycle reflector, orange and green striped bubble gum wrap, a pale blue pebble, a curved piece of bark and some wrinkled aluminum foil. Sae browses the city’s very top layer, rummaging yesterdays’ sedimentation in search of barely landed material more in touch still with the smell of the coffee she had placed aside of her than with the omnivorous earth below. I wasn’t there but this is how I imagine Sae collecting her bits and pieces before she takes them to the studio. Her studio is like a chamber situated on the outside of earth’s membrane in which the gigantic inner engine of the earth is projected a million times smaller. The melting, pressing and grinding that take place in Sae’s studio mirror geological processes occurring simultaneously deep down below. There is something obscure about a human-being making stones. It sounds like a dark and enigmatic craft from an ancient epic story. A bit like Der Golem, a 1915 German silent horror film in which a clay statue is brought to life by a Kabbalist rabbi.
A few days ago I carried a rock the size of my head to the top of a hill and placed it standing upright. Looking up from the valley I realized I had created a landmark. Sae’s gathering will probably go unnoticed. No matter how valuable, the before and after picture are too much alike. Taking away the most outstanding piece of bright plastic immediately creates another most outstanding piece of bright plastic. It’s just a role that is passed on without rupture. There is always a biggest, brightest and most colorful of anything anywhere. I try to imagine what her gesture would look like when upscaled by some significant magnitude. Not that I opt for this but I’m curious about what things are like when they are repeated, multiplied or blown up. It helps me understand things.
A rock points both to future and to past. Its material composition on the one hand is a solidified choreography, a portrait of a liquid past. At the same time it is an invitation to a forthcoming stone carver or jeweller. In her book A Land (1953), Jaquetta Hawkes describes this beautifully: “Once when I was in Moore’s studio and saw one of his reclining figures with the shaft of a belemnite exposed in the thigh, my vision of this unity was overwhelming. I felt that the squid in which life had created that shape, even while it still swam in distant seas was involved in this encounter with the sculptor; that it lay hardening in the mud until the time when consciousness was ready to find it out and imagination to incorporate it in a new form. So a poet will sometimes take fragments and echoes from other earlier poets to sink them in his own poems where they will enrich the new work as these fossil outlines of former lives enrich the sculptor’s work.”
Shipped by water, hauled by ice, launched by volcanoes. Rock travels in many ways. Humans have been shifting rock for millennia. Unintentional in pockets and shoes, tied to their bodies as ornamentation, and from quarries to building sites where it ends up cemented or dry stacked in architectural constructions. Sae’s rocks I imagine will stay on the move. By preventing the raw materials to sink into the earth she allows her conglomerates unforeseeable detours. How interesting to track and trace them as they go from hand to hand, from home to home until eventually are lost and disintegrate into fragments or grains which end up as xenolith intrusions in newly formed rock or puddingstone of the future.
