What do the rocks know about us anyway?

In the world of geology, boulders that have been carried away from their native bedrock by glaciers and deposited elsewhere are known as erratics. 

A selection of these natural curiosities, pictured on postcards collected by the artist Meghan Price, welcomes visitors into the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery exhibition space. Greetings from Balanced Rock in the Adirondacks or The Boulder at Sam's Point in New York, for example.

The anomalies — interesting not only to earth scientists — are revered by their local communities, who regard them as landmarks, treasures and emblems (in one example, friends of the Rollstone Boulder blasted their beloved rock to pieces when it was threatened by nearby quarrying so it could be reassembled on a more centrally-located traffic island downtown). 

Though we call these rocks erratics, from the point of view of the stones, it must be humans who are exhibiting the most erratic behaviour of all — having pushed our planet to the brink in just a few short lifetimes. 

That's the jump-off for curator Katie Lawson's exhibition Erratic Behaviour, which presents the art of eight contemporary artists from Canada and beyond whose work describes the fast-changing relationship between humans and the geologic in this moment of climate crisis. With weavings, found objects and kinetic sculpture, the exhibition attempts to answer a curious-sounding question that will only become more dire as we confront the depths of our ecological impact: What do the rocks know about us anyway?

"I'm really interested in the idea that the material of our Earth is a kind of archive or record of this span of time that we struggle to even conceive of," the curator says. "If we know how to look at them and how to listen to them, [rocks] are storytellers."

In a work that's both funny and poetic, the artist Robert Hengeveld transposes the movement of deep geologic time for the human timescale using wheeled robots to animate the dance of two convincingly recreated hip-high boulders. The pair whimsically waltz across the exhibition space at a tempo visitors can finally perceive.

Then, in another version of elapsed time, Laura Moore's Future Fossils series imagines the findings of a geologist studying Earth thousands of years from now. Her realistic gypsum cement sculptures resemble rock samples that bear the remains of electronic devices — the circuit board components of our Game Boys, cellphones and computer mice  — preserved in the stone like prehistoric leaves. The artist says she's thinking about what will come of the millions of tonnes of e-waste dumped in landfills annually. 

Moore, who's perhaps best known for her stone carvings, gravitated toward the medium, she says, because humans have a long history of recording their stories in rock. "Stone is a way to tell history." This project, however, is an inversion. It recognizes the rocks are also recording us. "And all our bad behaviour," she adds.  

The idea isn't just artful speculation, but as visitors will find evidenced on a low plinth nearby, it's already, at present, a fact. The porous stones displayed there are speckled with gristly bits of pink and blue. A tangle of yellow rope winds through another. These specimens, known as Plastiglomerates, were collected by artist Kelly Jazvac and geologist Patricia Corcoran from a beach on the Big Island of Hawaii that's known for its accumulation of plastic debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. 

The plastiglomerates — the term coined through Jazvac and Corcoran's research — are formed when molten plastic made by beach fires fuses with sediment and other natural debris. The stones are essentially man-made "thrice over," Jazvac explains; we manufacture the plastic, we litter it, and in most cases, we start the fires that form the plastiglomerate. 

"The phenomenon is not unique to Hawaii," she says. "They've since been reported all over the world." The most recent one she found was from Lake Huron.

Similarly interested in the migrations and transformations of commercial materials, a pool-like sculpture by Catherine Telford Keogh suspends an assortment of consumer goods — including Tic Tacs, Dole-brand asparagus and headache pills — as if in amber, or maybe, churning in the belly of capitalism itself. The sculpture prominently features a green onyx, the curator notes, that was quarried in Karachi, Pakistan; brought to Brooklyn by a marble supplier; then sold to outfit a number of Best Westerns in New York's tri-state area; the leftovers scooped up by the artist on the secondary market.

The sculptures of Tsēmā Igharas, meanwhile, reach back toward their natural form — the melted clumps of decommissioned Canadian pennies resembling the copper nuggets and dendrites that occur in rock. For the artist, the ore represents the vast gulf in notions of value between her Tahltan Nation, who have mined copper for millennia, and the injurious extractive operations favoured by the commodity market. 

Tahir Carl Karmali practices a related gesture he calls "reverse mining." For his wall-hangings, the Nairobi-born, New York-based artist has purchased dead cellphone batteries from eBay, which he's then harvested the cobalt from. He uses the metal to dye sheets of raffia ethically-sourced from producers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt and so many of the other minerals integral to the manufacture of rechargeable batteries are mined under appalling conditions. 

When our devices function almost magically — their innards engineered out of sight — Karmali's textiles are rough and irregular, he says, to reconnect his materials to the work of human hands. His work attempts to "show people what the raw reality is." 

Screened in one of Erratic Behaviour's final galleries, a video work by Diane Borsato probes the tension further, pushing into the realm of human myth. Gems and Minerals follows a group of museum guides, who conduct their tours in American Sign Language, waxing about the miraculous, hard-to-believe and outright ridiculous qualities people have ascribed to minerals, in contrast with stories of the violence and exploitation that are the realities of their extraction. If it's funny, the joke of Gems and Minerals is ultimately on us — and our precious stones are shown to be worse than fool's gold.   

So what do the rocks know about us? Enough? Too much? Perhaps everything, the exhibition suggests. They've watched us since the very beginning. They've seen us at our worst. And, in the end, they will record that we were ever even here at all. In fact, they've already begun to tell that story.