How to Understand a Rock is a deconstructed field guide that employs play, touch, and intimacy to discuss the relational disconnect between humans and the more-than-human world.
The rocks in this series come from a shield of Precambrian granite that blankets much of Canada (commonly known as the Canadian Shield) and ranges from 2 to 3 billion years old. While holding these rocks, most of which come from my childhood rock collection, Kate Schneider is struck by the incomprehensibility of deep time and the inexact and absurd ways we try to understand their life and formation. We know the basic structure of our planetary evolution, but when it comes to knowing the exact birth of a rock, we can only say it took between 10 minutes to 4.5 billion years to create.
Moving beyond scientific certainty, the artist wants to know how it feels to cradle an inanimate and essentially unknowable object. Is it comforting? Whimsical? Or even familial? Attempting to relate to something outside the human time scale is a contradiction; however, that contradiction makes human-geological intimacy fascinating.
Kate Schneider (b. 1980, Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist of settler ancestry living in Tkaronto (Toronto). As a life-long resident of the Great Lakes region, her artistic practice considers her personal and ethical relationship to her home and environment during a time of climate crisis.
She has received funding from the MacLaren Art Centre’s John Hartman Award (2020) and the Ontario Arts Council. Kate’s works have been shown extensively throughout North America in such galleries as the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Spellerberg Projects (Texas), and the Great Plains Art Museum (Nebraska), and published in numerous books and publications, such as PDN’s Photo Annual, Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), and What Makes a Lake by Another Earth Press. Kate’s first book, How to Understand a Rock, was produced through the Penumbra Foundation’s Risograph Publication Residency (2023).