Journal
Small is beautiful
In his Songs of Innocence, William Blake famously invites us “to see a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild flower”, and when he wrote those lines the microscope had begun to reveal tiny ‘worlds’ of astonishing complexity. The sources of the digitally scanned microlandscapes featured here are larger in scale, but similar in spirit. Lurking unseen for millions of years in minerals and finely detailed stones, they have been captured with a digital scanner and magnified only a few times to the size you see them on the page. With the exception of the tourmaline ‘ruined city’ the basic character of these images can be seen with the naked eye. What the scanner reveals is a wealth of detail and subtlety of colour, giving them a magical presence that has a striking kinship with the world we inhabit – from aerial views of the earth’s surface to fiery sunsets and half-familiar landscapes. Some of the correspondences are visual rather than systemic: the dendritic formations (usually of manganese) that suggest foliage, for example, are the product of a ‘growth’ process different to that of plants. The shared organic quality does, however, vividly evoke that order which John Ruskin believed infused both nature and great art and design. “There is sensation in every inch,” he wrote in The Lamp of Life, “and a determined variation in arrangement, which is exactly like the related proportions and provisions in the structure of organic form.” How better to describe the vivid landscape ‘drawings’ encountered in a calcite rhomboid? Discuss this article
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