Card Set No. 11 – Pacific Marks

Anyone seeing these stones for the first time might think they were a work of art created by human hands. The round openings are too regular, their shapes too precise. Yet no human created them; they are the work of mollusks.

Piddocks burrow into soft rock, creating their own chambers inside. Using their ribbed shells, they rasp away at the rock, working their way deeper and deeper into the stone. This creates small, precisely crafted sculptures that appear as though they were made by human hands.

When the mollusks move on, their boreholes remain in the stone. The soft rock is surprisingly light and fragile. Even slight pressure can cause the delicate forms to break.

Our stones come from a beach in Bolinas, California. Their unusual lightness became the starting point for our interpretation. For “Pacific Marks,” we documented them and staged them photographically so that they appear to float freely above the paper.

The mollusks that create these small sculptures are also featured in our series “Pacific Settler.”

• One card set contains 5 different motifs
• Format: 104 × 140 mm
• Offset printing in Zurich, Switzerland
• Z-Offset natural paper, 400 g/m²
• FSC-certified paper
• Concept & design: Bienvenue Studios