Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: stones

"Can you keep a secret? Will you hold your hand among the flames? Honey, you're a shipwreck With your heart of stone. Can I get a witness To the bruises and the wasted tears? You could dry a river With your heart of stone, With your heart of stone."

Bill Dan is a sculptor and performance artist specializing in rock balancing. He creates seemingly impossible, temporary balanced sculptures from un-worked rock and stone in public spaces near his home in Sausalito. Usually Bill Dan sets up shop on the weekends outside Piccolo cafe on Bridgeway. Dan was born in Indonesia, and worked as a warehouseman before discovering the artistic possibilities of rock along the San Francisco Bay shoreline and his emergent skill in manipulating them. Bill was initially inspired by rock piles he had seen on the Big Island of Hawaii, the cairns of the Inuit, and later by the work of Andy Goldsworthy. In 2004, he was featured on San Francisco public television station KQED as one of the artists in a show entitled "Collaborations with Nature." Since then, he has been the subject of interviews and shows on TV stations in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, as well as other U.S. stations. Bill Dan has frequently been asked about the "meaning" of his work, and he often replies that "Some people try to make things too complicated. This is the opposite."

Inukshuk means "in the likeness of a human" in the Inuit language. They are monuments made of unworked stones that are used by the Inuit for communication and survival. The traditional meaning of the inukshuk is "Someone was here" or "You are on the right path." The plural of inukshuk is inuksuit .The Inuit make inuksuit in different forms for a variety of purposes: as navigation or directional aids, to mark a place of respect or memorial for a beloved person, or to indicate migration routes or places where fish can be found. Other similar stone structures were objects of veneration, signifying places of power or the abode of spirits. Although most inuksuit appear singly, sometimes they are arranged in sequences spanning great distances or are grouped to mark a specific place. These sculptural forms are among the oldest and most important objects placed by humans upon the vast Arctic landscape and have become a familiar symbol of the Inuit and of their homeland. Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of inuksuit. An inukshuk (also known as inuksuk) is often venerated as symbolizing an ancestor who knew how to survive on the land in the traditional way. A familiar inukshuk is a welcome sight to a traveler on a featureless and forbidding landscape. An inukshuk can be small or large, a single rock, several rocks balanced on each other, round boulders or flat. Built from whatever stones are at hand, each one is unique. The arrangement of stones indicates the purpose of the marker. The directions of arms or legs could indicate the direction of an open channel for navigation, or a valley for passage through the mountains. An inukshuk without arms, or with antlers affixed to it, would act as a marker for a cache of food. An inukshuk in the form of a human being is called an inunnguaq.

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