FIGURATIONS—the “Faces in the Rocks” referenced in the book’s title—are often dismissed as mere pareidolia: the tendency to perceive familiar figures in natural formations. But elevating pareidolia from curiosity to fine art draws on the deep well of Surrealist practice. By moving beyond commonplace silhouettes—faces, animals, stray body parts—we gain access to the vast repertoire of images lodged in the unconscious: unsettling, forgotten, erotic, extravagant, even including scientific. Their power is intensified by their simultaneous, inarguable identity as rock or ice, whose intricate surfaces anchor them in reality. Their diversity and strangeness exceed anything we could invent on our own. This is the gift of nature’s seeming “chaos.”
