Katie Holten

Stone Alphabet (2016-ongoing) is an infinite series of drawings made with graphite, ink and water on stone paper. The work began during a Research Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France in April 2016.

Stone leaks knowledge. In 1778 Comte de Buffon wrote that “the entire face of the Earth today bears the imprint of human power”[1]. Stone Alphabet starts from a simple premise -- can we create a language beyond the human? Can we read and write the stones? Is there an ‘unconscious alphabet’ to be discovered[2]? Can we write words, short stories, fairytales, poems -- in stone?

[1] Georges Louis-Leclerc de Buffon, Les Époques de la nature, Paris, Imprimerie royale, 1780, vol. 2, p. 197.

[2] Marguerite Yourcenar, introduction to Roger Caillois’s “The Writing of Stones”, University Press of Virginia, 1985.

An extract from the Stone Alphabet is included in the current LANGUAGE issue of Emergence Magazine