From Fiery Flow to Cool Art

Humans have a long tradition of taking rocks and making pretty things with them. Usually, when you think of sculpture, you think of marble, right? I mean, of course, marble – marble’s a wonderful stone for sculptors, very hard and yet amenable to people carving and polishing it.

If I asked you for an igneous rock suitable for making art with, what would you give me? Big ol’ chunk of something in the granite family? Good choice! Polishes up a treat, that does, and it’s very monumental.

Here’s another igneous rock you could use:

A basalt column with its top carved into something abstract and lovely shiny black.
A basalt column with its top carved into something abstract and lovely shiny black. It looks a bit like waving seaweed.

Yes, you can use the Columbia River Basalts for some very impressive geoart.

You run across them in unexpected places. You’ll be bopping down the street, and suddenly – columns. The images above and below are in a cluster near a Burger King in Burien, Washington.

A cowboy-hatted man emerges from the top of a column. He's in profile with his head tilted down.
A cowboy-hatted man emerges from the top of a column.

The columns are quite popular for things like fountains.

There's a tall central column, then three progressively shorter ones clustered in front of it. All of them are splashing water.
Basalt column fountain at the entrance to our apartment complex.

These are huge, and heavy – this is an iron-rich rock. Some are rather easier to handle:

There are three columns, again each staggered in size, set in a bed of river stones.
A very short basalt column fountain outside a Burger King in Lincoln City, OR

I’m not sure what it is with basalt and Burger King around the Northwest.

If you’re ever walking along the Sammamish River in Woodinville, WA, keep an eye out for this towering beauty.

The column is irregular in shape, weathered to a pale gray, with green lichens growing on it. There's an elongated spiral and a medallion carved into it. The top corner is shaved off and polished to a brilliant silver shine.
Basalt column art standing beside the trail in Woodinville, WA

You can see how well this rock takes a polish – like a mirror up there. It’s a pretty fine-grained stone, and you can do very interesting things with the contrast between weathered, carved, and polished surfaces.

Image of a heron with Mount Rainier behind it, carved into the face of a column at Seward Park, Seattle, WA. The basalt is weathered brown. The carved images are black.
Image of a heron with Mount Rainier behind it, carved into the face of a column at Seward Park, Seattle, WA

It’s even a suitable surface for cartography.

Map of Seward Park carved into the top of the column. The lines of the map and the lettering of the legend are painted in gold and white.
Map of Seward Park carved into the top of the column.

And when winter comes along, you’ll see ice working to enhance the effect on the fountains.

The side view of the fountain at night shows thick ice caked on the tops and sides. Water is still spraying from the top. A green light backlights the scene.
The apartment complex’s fountain gets covered in ice during the brief times when it freezes around here.

Betcha never quite thought of basalt this way, but it’s an example of what I’ve always thought: even the most boring and prosaic old rocks can be beautiful. Sometimes, it’s for their story. Sometimes, it’s because they become a new story in an artist’s hands.

If you want to see these columns in their original context, I have some images here. Your jaw will drop at Dry Falls, guaranteed.

 

Originally published at Scientific American/Rosetta Stones.

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From Fiery Flow to Cool Art
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6 thoughts on “From Fiery Flow to Cool Art

  1. 2

    The first question is do you want a more matte finish (as seen above) or a finish like a lot of kitchen countertops. This is really a choice of mineral size. Basalt will have very small minerals due to its fast cooling (being near the surface). However if you look at gabbro (which of course is basalt that crystalized at depth) you have much larger mineral grains which may polish out better. Interestingly if you look at lab optical tables they are basically large blocks of basalt, with a surface that like the Stewart Park monument above. (up to 8foot by 10 foot in size) You set your lasers and optical devices on the block and the weight of the block cancels out a lot of vibrations.

  2. 3

    Optical tables appear to have changed since I last saw one in the mid 1970s they are no longer made of big rocks but stainless steel now.

  3. 4

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com has a dodgy security cert, only way to see the pics at those URLs is to add an exception. Or copy/paste and change it to plain http.

    blogs.scientificamerican.com uses an invalid security certificate.
    The certificate is only valid for the following names: a248.e.akamai.net, *.akamaihd.net, *.akamaihd-staging.net, *.akamaized.net, *.akamaized-staging.net
    (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

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