Cartography Through Sedimentary Consciousness #39

2025 October #013. A vast expanse of layered stone unfolds like an open book of compressed time, each stratum of terracotta and rust labeled with the vocabulary of inner life: Sentiment, Pondiment, Anguish, Melancholy. These words, typically ethereal and abstract, here become solid geology—emotional states transformed into mappable terrain. Blue and green waterways wind through the formations, their own labels flowing with them: Realization, Intention, carrying meaning like sediment downstream. A weathered pickaxe hovers at the composition's edge, tool of the excavator, the archaeologist of self. Its presence suggests that understanding requires deliberate digging, a mining of what has accumulated and hardened over time. Most striking is the partial head revealed in cross-section, interior crystalline structures catching light like hidden geodes, connected to the external landscape through luminous blue channels. This is cartography of consciousness made literal—the migration of psychological language into geological vocabulary, abstract feeling into measurable strata. Here the semantic drift becomes visible: our interior terminology borrows from earth science, geology lends its language to emotion, and somewhere in the translation, new meaning crystallizes. What was once simply sadness becomes a deposited layer, melancholy transforms into something with weight and position, accessible through excavation. The artwork suggests that all our words for feeling are already borrowed terms, migrated meanings, symbols drifting between domains. We map the unmappable, geologize the ephemeral, and in doing so, create new ways to see what was always there—the landscape within, waiting to be charted, its vocabulary forever shifting between the visible and the felt.