Unique, informative, and extraordinary, "Bad Luck, Hot Rocks" is an
unusual and unreservedly recommended addition to personal,
community, college, and university library collections.
*Midwest Book Review*
Documenting the conscience letters written by those returning
stolen rocks to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, ‘Bad
Luck, Hot Rocks’ offers a uniquely touching insight into human
nature and our relationship with the planet.
*Dazed*
The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints
of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona’s
Petrified Forest National Park. Some who pocketed a rock were later
guilt-stricken into sending them back, and some even included
letters of lamentation and curses. Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience
Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, published in
November by the Ice Plant, is a photography and archive project by
artists Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr to document these stolen fossils
and their woeful apologies.“They are beautiful, but I can’t enjoy
them — they weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience,” one
reads. “I can assure you that I have been smitten of conscience
since I returned home and instead of pleasant memories of your
park, I feel guilty,” wails another. Thompson first discovered
these mea culpas during a visit to the park’s Rainbow Forest Museum
in 2011, where a few of the “conscience letters” were on display.
On further investigation, he found they were just a few from an
archive of over 1,200 going back to 1934. The next year, he
returned with Orr to photograph them in a collaborative project
that’s now the Bad Luck, Hot Rocks book.
*Hyperallergic*
In Bad Luck, Hot Rocks, these letters are paired side-by-side with
photographs of rocks from the “conscience pile” (returned rocks
cannot be scattered back into the forest and are instead collected
in a pile along a service road). The reader of these letters sits
on the priest’s side of a confessional booth—a non-denominational
one, sanctioned by the Parks Service. This offers a distinct and
fascinating perspective: throw your problems next to something 200
million years old, step back, and take a look. As you read these
painstakingly handwritten confessions, it is possible to see the
thieves’ cancers and kidney stones in beautiful lumps of rock,
trace broken marriages along cracks that were once tree rings, and
feel something hard for fleeting moments…a funny thing. This book
is timeless, as deep or as shallow as you want it to be.
*The Improbable*
“Bad Luck, Hot Rocks” is part of Thompson’s exploration of that
relationship, in particular the significance that people attach to
geologic oddities. In earlier projects, he has documented
“meteorwrongs,” rocks initially identified as meteorites but later
demoted to terrestrial status; glacial erratics, boulders left
behind in foreign landscapes by melting ice; and an occult belief
system built by a former I.B.M. research scientist around the
geometries of quartz crystals. These peculiar interactions of man
and mineral speak, Thompson believes, to the breakdown of human
logic in the face of geologic time and space.
*The New Yorker*
Indeed, if “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks” has any anything to tell us, it is
that in sharing these small, seemingly insignificant confidences,
we find comfort, consolation, if not quite redemption that they
are, as they have always been, the currency of our living, for good
or ill.
*Los Angeles Times*
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