Recently, I've been so enchanted by the inner beauty of geodes and how they are created. Like everything, they start out as nothing — cavities hollowed out by forces of nature like underground volcanic gas bubbles or earth carved out by tree roots that have since decayed. And then, over ages, these pockets welcome a variety of hydrothermal fluids and other natural liquids carrying dissolved minerals (like quartz, calcite, and amethyst). Over thousands and thousands of years, the water gradually evaporates away or dries out, and we're left with variegated mineral deposits that have crystallized over time to form geodes.

After all that geological activity, geodes end up looking like any other grayish brownish rock on the outside, but on the inside, they're full of layers of colorful, vibrant crystals. I've seen geodes whose insides reminded me of a tropical beach or a sunsetting sky, solid in the palm of my hand.

What I love most about geodes, in all their crystalline gradient beauty and veiled mystery, is that they're physical manifestations of the passage of time. They grow very slowly, often just a few microns (millionth of a meter!) per year, and their inner crystals contain traces of all the eras that passed to form them. They're like precious rainbow time capsules.

In some way, geodes are kind of like humans. There are so many long-running processes that are perpetually in play, shaping the contours of each and every one of our realities. Civilizations and cultures, ideas and philosophies, physical and digital infrastructures down to the air we breathe and the thoughts we think and the clothes we wear every single day are shaped by ancient processes, rifts, and movements that started long before we were even born.

This collection of geode contour lines examines the seeming linearity of time, its passage, and eventual circularity. Like the rings of tree trunks and depths of the ocean and layers of the atmosphere, there are gradations to nearly everything around us. There's an inherent repetition to life. Sometimes it feels like I wake up every day and do the same thing. But then, I can choose to revel in the marvel of navigating a world built by people before me and around me, while building out a timeline that others, too, will inhabit.

In this collection, I build a visual argument about how repetition doesn't have to be mundane. With every repeated contour line, there are small distortions that amplify over subsequent iterations, and some irregularities that subside. Each line follows the rough path charted by the one before it and sets the stage for the next one, like how knowledge, culture, and identity are passed from generation to generation.

Artwork

Process and reflection

I started drawing geode contour lines on my iPad in 2021, during the pandemic, a collective disruption of our linear lives. At the time, I was making these geode contour lines just as a personal meditation on the micro-irregularities in the human act of repetition. After a 4-year hiatus, I resumed my geode contour lines practice and built out this collection by repeating this meditation multiple times over. In a way, my own relationship to this collection has followed a winding, meandering path, but I find myself back where I started: creating anything beautiful is a celebration of our ability as humans to crystallize of the passage of time and reflect outwards the multitudes that we hold inside.