White hot and red flames still licked the slowly blackening ground after the eruption. Soon, the cool rains would come and wash traces of minerals into the spaces where gases had bubbled and escaped. Other minerals had come up from the depths of the Cauldron along with the lava. Gold. Copper. Iron. Nickel. Manganese. These ran in rivers along the black banks, solidifying into seams and underground lakes, frozen in their tracks. The air was hot, poisonous, and the sky was as red as the flames.
The weight of the mantle as it rolled over the new land pressed these traces into garnets, diamonds. In other Rooms quartz, peridot, topaz, chalcedony, carnelian, amethyst, hematite, pyrite, grew into giant crystals. They lay, attached to the walls of their original Womb, until the rains and the violent movements of the Earth cracked and freed them. They rolled into the Sea while lightning snapped, twisted and sizzled endlessly overhead, sometimes striking the tormented waters. Unseen, something very small combined and formed, combined and formed under the Oceans, and then it began to twitch, pulse and move.
Acrylic on paper and silk with glass, gold, quartz, garnets, peridots, amethysts and topaz 16.5 x 25 cm.
