The Stoned Men and Beyond | 27th September 2011 | 20:50 PDT

In this here area there are many stoned men that scatter the area, they're mainly found in rural or beach areas and there appears to be so many, you can smell them in the air and funnily enough I'm not talking about British Columbia's finest green export (not that I can imagine much of it reaches the docks in order to exported)

I am banging on about stone statues that look like men, which when I first saw them I impressed by them and was left in a kind of awe, as they looked so unusual and in most cases, quite ugly – in a good way. They're called an Inuksuk and the more popular Inunnguaq; names which seemed to have been chosen by blindly throwing narwhal whales at the alphabet until the participants got bored after a few throws and decided that'll do.

Oh hello, how are you? Stoned I see.

Inuksuk they're are found along the Arctic circle of North America and are used to mark a passage, fishing spots, points of interest within the Arctic tundra – like an unmanned tourist information board for staying alive. Inunnguaq are the stone structures that represent a human, possibly to represent a community near-by as the size of them would require more than the work of one person.

Walking along the west side of Stanley Park down to the Burrard bridge, you notice the rocky beaches are covered with the results of stone stacking and rock figures enduring the incoming tide it appears that Inuksuk have evolved and inspired a more challenging past time and has been turned into eco-art.

Now... Nobody move...

The practice of rock-balancing which, unless you have been living underneath a large hard solid nonmetallic mineral matter something and haven't grasped what rock balancing was when you first read “rock-balancing” you probably should turn off your computer with your face and go outside or, carry on reading as I'm about to explain. Rock-balancing is where you find oddly shaped rocks and you use the smallest point of it as the connecting surface and you (wait for it...) balance the rock on that small point!

Jozsef Toth is one of the great local (probably only) experts in rock balancing resides by the entrance of Granville Island tucked away on a beach below he has been amazing the passer-by that are observant enough to see him, and has been doing it for over 10 years.

Have a Balanced Day, sir.

You can easily watch him for hours take a ludicrous shaped rock and carefully balance it in a seemingly impossible way, if you're lucky enough to see him in action, than pass on from me what a visual treat his pieces of art are to admire.

1 comment:

kandls said...

as, always, roop, very good read and awesome pictures. thanks.