A round mound made of big irregular boulders, interleaved together small and large to make an almost smooth cone at Mercury’s north pole
Flat rocks laid in circles, one layer on the next, each layer bigger for a few layers, then the same for two or three, then smaller, slowly, up to a rounded point, so that it looked like a big pinecone of rock
One big boulder topped by gold, melting in the brightside crossing onto the rubble plain below it
Another boulder, encased in stainless steel, not melting
Another, rubbed with cinnarbar
Patterned gaps in the ground filled with liquid copper
Shards attached to a knobby headland so that it looked like a cactus
Silhouettes in silver, left on the ground through the brightside
Sand castles turned to glass by the brightside crossing
Twenty rocks on a rubble plain painted white and put back in place
A chest-high oval ring of drywall using flat stones, with fat rounded capstones on top, and a single gap for a door into the center A rock shaped like South America, balanced on its Tierra del Fuego Stainless steel wire snarled in broken orbits around a boulder Almost cubical rocks in a single stack twenty rocks high Elliptically rounded rocks stacked four and five high Ten thousand pebbles arranged together on their ends in the shape of a whirlpool Cliff sides carved to mirror smoothness and then etched by the Sanskrit lettering for Om Mani Padme Hum Rock pile compass roses, Medicine Wheels, stone circles, henges, inuksuk A conical hut like the end of a spaceship sticking up out of the plain
Inside the terraria, the possibilities blossomed:
Twigs twisted into circles. Leaves into cornucopia Pink cherry blossoms filling a pool Branches like bones assembled into a cradle Red poppy petals wrapped around a boulder, boulder replaced among its gray mates Ice henges. Igloo segments. Ice sheets broken and reassembled in sphere shapes
Long sticks woven into semicircular patterns in shallow smooth water
Leaf lines, shifting the leaves from red to orange to yellow to yellow-green to green
Earthworks in long sinuous lines
“History is a product of labor just like the work of art itself, and obeys analogous dynamics”