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

It is common practice to display stones with accompanying objects. We do this because the objects can suggest an approach to a stone that a viewer wouldn’t otherwise consider. A tiny boat floating in the sand of a suiban can transform a stone into an island in the viewer’s imagination. A bronze grasshopper can change the scale of that same stone into a rock in a garden. Accompanying objects and images can suggest a season, reference a poem, allude to time and place or draw our attention to a particular feature of a stone.   

In this display, the broken torso of a model of Michelangelo’s iconic sculpture David is paired with a turquoise fragment in such a way that the viewer is encouraged to understand the mineral as a somewhat abstracted (and larger-scale) fragment of a torso as well. Imagine a figurative sculpture broken off above the abdomen and below the knees. The surface texture of the turquoise fragment and that of the sculpture are similar. The natural undulations of the mineral specimen mirror the musculature of the sculpture. The turquoise specimen may be the torso of a figure rising to a challenge or slumping backward into repose. It might be an athlete or an Amazon. The smooth-textured, more intensely colored portions of the surface might be the remnants of a robe that once draped over the body. This is, admittedly, quite a feat of imagination, but what one sees in a stone is, always, in the mind of the beholder. Without this intimate juxtaposition of the two fragments, the turquoise would remain a mineral specimen and the broken sculpture an unfortunate accident.