Word: basalt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero's exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces -- king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object -- altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry...
...heraldic encounter, the dungeons and dragons that lie within the shapes of chessmen. Loving the double image, Corbero is part heir to Catalan surrealism. The son and grandson of metalsmiths, he sometimes gets a bit overrefined for American taste, but his delight in odd tropes -- like making forms in basalt that conventionally would be done in metal -- has its ! own authentic motives. He remains a very considerable sculptor...
Their risky efforts paid off. The cliffs, part of a stratum of sedimentary shale and sandstone interleaved with volcanic basalt, date from between 225 million and 175 million years ago. The entire rock formation was long thought to be virtually devoid of fossils and thus of little interest to paleontologists. In fact, says Neil Shubin, 25, a graduate student in biology at Harvard, the site they discovered "looks like Rocky Road ice cream. It's dark rock absolutely splattered with bone." Says his partner, Geologist Paul Olsen, 32, of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "We were shocked...
Hanford, Wash. Already used as a depository for low-level radioactive wastes, the tract in southeastern Washington is owned by the Federal Government. Its disadvantage, in the view of environmentalists, is that it is in the Columbia Basin. The Energy Department proposes carving a cavern in the basalt rock some 3,000 ft. below the surface, and contends that the radioactivity could never seep into underground water sources or the river. Many job-conscious residents of the three nearby cities of Kennewick, Richland and Pasco were happy that their area remained under consideration. "We're better educated about nuclear...
...When I went to Rome I became so fascinated with bronze that I stuck with it," he says. "Now that I look back, I think I should have gone up to Carrara and spent more time getting to know stone." A summer at the international sculpture symposium in the basalt quarries of Eugene, Oregon gave him his first opportunity...