Erratic Boulder

My name is Maura Doyle and I'm the artist that brought this "Erratic Boulder" to Toronto. It spent about 12,000 years up near the Kawartha Lakes region, near Bobcaygeon. It traveled from there to the Toronto Sculpture Garden by flat bed truck, where it stayed for 6 months. And then from there it traveled by dump truck to Christie Pits Park. And we don't know how long it'll stay here, but hopefully for a while. It weighs 10 tons and it's a billion years old. Erratic boulders are formed by glacier, slow moving ice that picks up big chunks of rock and the rock gets moved around and rounded and scraped. So there's a lot of marks you can see on the rock.

I came up with the project in thinking that I wanted to transport my own boulder to the city, kind of my own geologic gesture. Because I wasn't creating the artwork myself or transforming it in any way, the artwork for me was actually the gesture. I got interested in erratic boulders when I started to think about boulders that I was seeing around the city. And these rocks, because they're so big and hard to move, I was sort of... it's almost like the city grew up around them. So I like to think about how the history of humanity can be framed by geologic time.

By designating a boulder as art, I think it, in some ways, makes all the boulders around Toronto become art as well. So it, kind of, plays with what is art and what is not art. And I think that these boulders they're all special and they all have a sort of unique story to tell.

Runtime 00:01:57