I just returned from a quick trip to Arizona for the annual Gem and Mineral show. Each year, thousands of jewelers, collectors, and rockhounds alight on the city of Tucson in search of the new. It’s a bit ironic, considering the material in question is hundreds of millions of years old, that we show up hunting for novelty each year. Sometimes the newness is true - someone found a previously untapped mining deposit, or unearthed a cache of hard-to-find material from a collector’s archive. But the newness is mostly internal: each year I return to Tucson with fresh eyes, not because earth’s offerings have changed much, but excited to see how a year of life, of making, of new creative preoccupations, has...
Read more