Quarry
Wallpaper
Quarry
Quarry imagines marble with a rather less geological attitude to colour. Familiar veins, fractures and cloudy mineral markings spread across an expansive surface, but the palette belongs to somewhere altogether more fanciful. The result has the presence of stone without much interest in behaving like it.
Marble is already an extraordinary piece of natural drawing. Its markings can be delicate, unruly, dramatic or strangely graphic, often within the same piece. Quarry enjoys that visual richness while removing the expectation that stone should come in colours we recognise. Unexpected combinations bring something playful to an otherwise imposing surface.
There is an ambiguity here that I particularly like. At first glance, the scale suggests something monolithic, almost as though an enormous piece of stone has been placed across the wall. Yet the longer you look, the less convincing that explanation becomes. The colour is too curious, the transitions too unexpected and the geology just a little too good to be true. That slight impossibility is really the point.
Stone carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage. We associate it with permanence, architecture, monuments and value. Quarry borrows some of that grandeur but doesn’t take it too seriously. The natural markings provide a wonderfully convincing visual language from which to invent something much less restrained.
The extended patterns are important to that illusion. Repetition isn’t immediately obvious, so the surface has room to wander. Veins drift through one area, disappear into another and meet unexpected changes in colour elsewhere. Rather than reading as a conventional wallpaper motif, the wall becomes one continuous expanse.
Quarry sits somewhere between geology and fantasy. It isn’t trying to convince anyone that the wall is made from marble. It is far more interested in imagining the marble that nature forgot to make.
The Colours
