Conversations About Landscape: Library of Earth Anatomy

Join us for the debut of Exploratorium Artist-in-Residence Ilana Halperin’s Library of Earth Anatomy, a collection of remarkable geological artifacts that invite and inspire us to see rocks in new ways. Created for the Exploratorium’s Fisher Bay Observatory the Library employs unconventional classification methods to dissolve the usual boundaries between nature and culture, as well as between animal, vegetable, and mineral.

Premised on the notion that “Earth’s geological record is like a book whose pages have been ripped apart and scattered about,” the Library reveals the unusual richness of Bay Area “geologic literature.” Its rock fragments tell many stories. A series of cards correlated to the rocks guide us in the apprehension that the solidity of rock is an illusion, and that the scale of geologic time is immense.