A miniature installation: two pebbles with one watercolour-painted portrait of a pebble on another pebble rock's flat surface
A miniature installation: one pebble covered with watercolour pigments rested upon a watercolour painting, with which visual adventure expresses and concludes my sensation of the pebble's passage of time in the form of automated colour drawings
These two stones were discovered in my backyard when I dug a new planting hole for moving a young maple tree. The surprising finding of many pebble rocks revealed the unexpected geological history of my tiny backyard - it must have been flowed and washed by vast quantities of running water for millenniums. So, the stones were shaped by the interaction of water, ice, sand and, most importantly - time. Besides, each one of the rocks is a world of its own, with its unique geological history to tell, as well as chemical compositions forming its appearance. As we can see from the video, two bright lines are running across the darker gray limestone. Each bright line is a layer of sediment, which tells a story of many thousands of years. In the eyes of natural historians and geologists, those seemingly humble-looking rocks actually contain the most important messages revealing what and how we came into being.
Meanwhile, as a visual artist, such thoughts intrigued me, and I decided to shed some new light on their meaning of interactions. For this reason, my narrative describes one pebble rock echoing the appearance of another rock: as they belong to each other for at least tens of thousands of years, interconnected with soil, sand and water until I dig them up and separate them. Consequently, I feel obligated to give them another means of linkage.
Without seemingly coherent storytelling, this animation project experiments with visual aesthetics in timing and movements. To maximize the visual experience of the actions by strictly timing the animated movements with the rhythm of the music. The music I choose to work with this project is the Prelude from Cello Suite No.1 in G major (BWV 1007). Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach between 1717 and 1723, the immortality nature of this classical music is not very dissimilar to the pebble - they all have been washed by the flow of time and survived.
Ultimately, this experimental animation investigates some aspects of storytelling using pre-existing objects, such as found pebbles, combined with hand-drawn frame-by-frame animated elements that appropriated a non-narrative visual performance. The whole narrative expresses my appreciation of the stunning nature and its tales of time. And I also wish — we — as the observers and creators of our civilization, could last longer than this thin layer of sediment in the pebble.