By Richard Turner

This display incorporates a piece of chert or limestone into a sculpture comprising a plaster bust, a knobbed bamboo stick, and a computer-carved sheet of mahogany. The stone plays a featured role in the sculpture, but it is not the dominant element as it is in most viewing stone displays. The sedimentary rock, found in California on the shores of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, is riddled with holes bored by mollusks and encrusted with mineral deposits from seawater. The plaster bust that rests on the stone like a sleeping head on a pillow is similarly eroded by a cluster of holes as if to suggest that the mermaid is dreaming herself into the stone, that she is becoming one with the sea bed. The bamboo stick floats past on the wind-ruffled surface of the mahogany water, oblivious of the dreaming / dying mermaid.