Seeing into Stone refers to a technique experienced stone carvers use when they work on sculptural objects: the sculptor contemplates on the surface of a stone to anticipate the structure and natural growth beneath it. 

In the series of collages, historical photographs by Veniamin Metenkov are combined with contemporary images from product catalogs of mining and machine building companies. 

For this series, custom screenprinting inks were developed using pigments sourced from the Ural Mountains. Ground jarosite, volkonskoite, and malachite tint the historic images and imprint the tools onto plexiglass, embedding the region’s mineral matter directly into the work.

The project centers around human relationships to rock and soil, and extractive realities that are created by defining mountains as resources. Through material and historical layering, Seeing into Stone points to the role of industrialisation in colonial processes and to the enduring cycles that bind human activity to the deep time of the earth.