Pebbles are among the most beautiful, mysterious and unpredictable objects in our world, unique little worlds in themselves, adorned with indecypherable heiroglyphics or punctured, scarred and textured by the elements or the burrowings of creatures.
Pebble Dash is a simple way to pay homage to pebbles, starting with a handful of pastel fragments pressed into and scraped across a sheet of black paper, then formed into a shape by a pale surrounding and turned into 3D illusions by adding light. Thus a few seconds of random mark-making becomes the impersonation of an object you might want to hold in your palm.
Here are some examples of pebbles created in this way by students at some of my classes and workshops
Study of real pebble
Imaginary pebble
Pebble ......................................................
(for Tom Walker, inspired by his painting, Pebble)
How did it happen
the voice of Pebble -
shuffled and stroked
for millennia by sea
and the grey hands of winds?
An ordinary stone
rewarded for its patience
with the slow piercing of its throat -
One of the chosen from
millions of rolling stones -
And under Tom's hands
his coaching of Pebble -
Pebble began to bloom
Pebble began to sing
rising to the X-factor -
Of its cosmic beginnings
Grace Nichols
