Common Formation

October, 2026

In Common Formation, I bring small gravel stones into a measured grid, using acrylic paint to bind them to a shared surface. I am drawn to gravel partly because it is so readily treated as an undifferentiated mass. Looking at individual stones reveals differences that this familiarity tends to obscure. “Common” refers both to their ordinary status and to the shared condition I construct for them - a measured arrangement in which they occupy equivalent positions without becoming equivalent things.

I use grid as a central motif to this encounter. It gives irregular forms comparable positions within a rational structure. Their edges, proportions, and orientations continually interrupt the regularity that holds them together. Order makes these differences legible, while the differences prevent the order from becoming complete. I work within this tension between the coherence of a system and the particularity of what it contains. Similarity and difference become mutually revealing: repetition establishes a shared rhythm, while sustained looking brings individual characteristics into focus.

The word “formation” names two processes operating across different timescales. Geological formation produces the stones; artistic formation brings them into an arrangement. I determine spacing, placement, paint, and framing, working with forms whose making lies outside those decisions. My authorship lies in some aspects of the work more than others. Its overall structure is deliberate, but much of its formal complexity is inherited from the material. Making involves establishing relationships among things that already possess their own form.

This continues the inquiry I began in Given, in which a fabricated base respond to the found stone. Here, I extend the relationship between material and human intention across a collective field. Acrylic paint performs both a physical and an artistic role: it secures the stones while establishing the manufactured condition through which they are encountered. Stone, paint, and grid bring natural processes and human systems into direct contact.

I mix stones brought from Korea, my home country, with stones from Chicago, where I live, without visible distinctions of provenance. Their geographic origins are factual, but not necessarily available to perception. Places that are distant, culturally distinct, and personally significant to me become difficult to separate at the scale of a piece of gravel. This connects Common Formation to the questions of land and memory I explore in Shape of Land. Actual fragments of ground expose the distance between what material contains, what its appearance reveals, and what I know about it.

The work also develops my interest in the contemplative attention given to stones within suseok - a traditional Korean art form of appreciating natural stone as object of contemplation. I extend this attention across commonplace fragments, allowing recognition to develop through comparison. A stone’s presence emerges through its own characteristics and through its proximity to others. Difference in shape, detail or scale becomes consequential within the group.

Seen from a distance, the work gathers into a unified pattern. At closer range, that unity opens into separate encounters. Through Common Formation, I sustain this movement between collective order and individual form, asking how the structures we create shape our attention—and how ordinary materials continue to exceed the terms through which we organize them.