ART AND EARTH: A HANDS-ON INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE COURSE

While not everyone is an artist, all of us respond to the constructed environment and to art itself. People involved in the visual arts, including architecture as well as painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, and jewelry design not only encounter these materials, but actively take advantage of properties that are intrinsically related to their geologic origins – for example, strength in architectural stone as a result of magma cooling or metamorphism to produce interlocking crystals, or compaction of sediment to produce sandstone and limestone; the ease of shedding the microfossils that comprise a piece of chalk to make a mark; the color imparted to a pigment in relation to its mineral structure, or to a gemstone by its mineral impurities. Students gain a deeper connection to these materials by understanding more about their origins in the Earth. This course also exploits people’s natural tendencies to enjoy visual and tactile experiences to help them learn about Earth – to understand the geoscience that creates the setting for many of these experiences.

In this course, students discover the relationships between the properties that dictate materials’ artistic utility, and the processes in the Earth that developed those properties. They also explore wastes produced in the creation of “raw” art materials, and environmental toxicity related to the use of these substances. A hallmark of the course is an art gallery installation. Each student produces an original titled art object for public display, an associated paper, and a short summary posted next to the piece in the exhibit. The paper reviews the geographic origins of the materials used, the geologic processes involved in producing the materials, and the means of extracting the materials from the Earth, as well as a discussion either of environmental impacts associated with the extraction, or the toxicology of the materials.