Concrete Cat

September 7, 2009

This summer my wife and stayed in Canada for our holidays. We drove to Vancouver from Edmonton, then to Prince George from Vancouver and back home from there. We saw a lot of cool things on our travels and I want to try and share a few of them with you.

During our travels we stopped in at Trochu Alberta to see my parents. I usually get pretty bored in Trochu and we either end up golfing or playing cards. On this visit though my parents took us to Dry Island Provincial Park. I was blown away by the landscape we saw there and I will get into that
on a later post but for this particular entry I want to talk about a great rock I saw.

I am by no means I geologist so these comments are based solely on the observation of a layman. The rock itself looks to be sandstone and I am guess that the voids in it are from water erosion. This rock is one of the best mixed media pieces I have seen in nature and I really love it. First the colour is quite striking and I find that the natural contrast of what looks to be iron oxide against the sandstone is perfect. I am constantly amazed at how nature can balance colour so much better than humans can.

Secondly I love the composition of this piece. The voids are really what generate interest in it. I have discussed many times that with concrete the voiding is really the key to a great piece. Somehow the viewer always seems to fill in substance and meaning when confronted with a void.
One of the voids in this rock held the key to why I called this a “mixed media” piece.

Upon closer inspection of the rock I was delighted to see that a colony of paper wasps had taken residence in the voids of the rock. I am very interested in colony insects, especially bees and wasps (I worked for a few summers as a teenager at a bee farm). Seeing these ingenious insects using something I viewed as art as their home was the ultimate conflation of form and function. Nature has always been at the heart of my design aesthetic and examples like this are why.