Our purpose is to establish an ongoing international dialogue about contemporary displays that will help to promote stone appreciation. We encourage members of the global viewing stone community to create new ways of displaying stones that reflect your life in the 21st century, your regional geology, your customs, craft and culture. Unfamiliar types of stones, bases, accessories and materials are welcome. We are not confined to displaying viewing stones in either the traditional Japanese or Chinese manner. These are options available to us and we should respect and acknowledge the established ways of displaying stones, but they are not the only way. It is timely to explore exciting new options to create stone displays that have bases, display tables, and other accessories that reflect our regional and national arts and crafts.

By Richard Turner

Sometimes, our stones speak to us in unexpected ways. This piece of limestone and chert, which was probably collected in China, recently surprised me. I was initially attracted to it because it suggested a worn cliff face marbled with layers of caramel and black sediment. During the time I spent with the stone, thinking about the design of an appropriate base, it became something entirely different. It transformed into the profile of a demonic beast bent on death and destruction. It had an overhanging brow, a prominent nose, lips stretched into a broad grimace around a mouthful of fangs and clenched teeth, and blunted horns protruding from its head.

Although I knew that this horror-movie vision was simply a product of my imagination projecting a fantastic image onto the screen of the stone, I resolved to work with the unwelcome hallucination. Which is where the title Ars Longa, Vita Brevis came from. The phrase is a Latin translation of Hippocrates’ aphorism, which means “acquiring skill takes time and life is short”. If this stone, at least in my own imagination, had become a symbol for death, then the base had to be a symbol for art, hence the painter’s palette. I decided to use this startling reminder of my mortality as an excuse to renew my commitment to spending time in my studio “acquiring skill.” In the following two weeks, I designed displays for eleven stones.