Each one a word spoken is the first in a new series of paintings based on stones found on the beaches of Cornwall, where I live. The working title for the series is Nothing makes itself. Due to the accidental arrangement of mineral deposits, the pebbles have eroded over thousands (and possibly millions) of years to resemble faces. Some stones are as old as the earth itself, some have traversed great distances between continents, and some have come from space—the result of collisions among asteroids, comets, moons, and planets.
Each one a word spoken is a reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 work of fiction, The Author of Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics. The story speculates on a future field of human study dedicated to ‘…deciphering the secret language of things large and small’. Le Guin even goes so far as to imagine rocks and stones themselves as language or poetry, what she describes as, the ‘…wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic, poetry of the rocks, each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.’
Hugely prophetic (it is now generally agreed that non-human ‘things’, such as plants, fungi and forests, not only communicate, but work together with other organisms and creatures), Le Guin’s speculative fiction has been taken up by multi-species feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway. In her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble, Haraway asks how we might ‘…think-with, live-with, and be-with other planetary organisms in a world that doesn’t forget how much ecological trouble it is in.’ One of the book’s key concepts is that of ‘sympoiesis’. Deriving from the ancient Greek sún (together, with) and poíēsis (creation, production), sympoiesis means simply ‘making-with' or ‘becoming-with’. In Haraway’s hands, sympoiesis is both an alternative to, and critique of, autopoiesis—the western, neoliberal and colonial fantasy of the self-making, and world-making, human individual. To put it simply (and this is where my series title derives from): nothing makes itself.
Drawing on Le Guin, Haraway and others, I like to imagine my stones-with-faces, not just as poems or songs—expressions of the immense geological forces that formed them, and of which they bear the marks—but also witness-ambassadors to the emergence of life on Earth and its slow evolutionary transformations. But if this is so then they must also be a witness to the recent, accelerated destruction of the planet’s creatures and ecosystems, and carry with them what Richard Seymour, in his 2022 book The Disenchanted Earth, describes as unwelcome news of our unacknowledged dependencies upon those systems we continue to exploit. Because nothing makes itself, nothing—including humans—can go forward by itself either. Whether or not humans will still be here, I like to think that my little stones will go on watching and witnessing—and therefore speaking of—the planet and its stories, deep into its potential futures…