The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is carved directly into Hobart's Berriedale Peninsula, with walls made from roughly 250-million-year-old sandstone that formed when Tasmania was still part of the supercontinent Gondwana. This unique setting provides the perfect backdrop for Berlin-based French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière's latest exhibition, Hard Core.
An Artistic Journey Through Deep Time
Hard Core is not merely an exhibition about rocks. It delves into how humans fit into deep time, and how we extract, reshape, and utilize rocks that took millions of years to form. From an earth scientist's perspective, Charrière's sprawling exhibition feels like an abstract field trip, moving between ancient rocks, glacial boulders, volcanic products, and the materials that underpin modern life.
Humans as a Geological Force
Many of Charrière's works explore a simple yet powerful idea: the things we consume are bound to deep time. The rocks, minerals, and metals that underpin modern life took thousands to millions of years to form, yet we extract them in an instant.
The first work, Not All Who Wander Are Lost (2019), features four glacial erratics—boulders carried by glacial ice and deposited far from their origin. The name derives from the Latin errare, meaning "to wander." These boulders, roughly waist to chest high, were all collected from the same Swiss valley, though each began its journey from a different source. They sit atop a row of drill cores—long cylinders of rock usually extracted from deep underground. Scientists study drill cores like flipping through the pages of a book to learn about Earth's history and resources. Charrière has broken the cylinders and repaired them with metals such as brass, aluminium, and stainless steel—materials that come from rocks themselves. The contrast is uncomfortable: while geological processes moved these rocks over thousands of years, humans now shift them across the world, cut into them, and remake them into modern materials. This work is not simply about glaciation or mining; it highlights humanity's growing role as a geological force.
Breathing Two-Billion-Year-Old Air
Charrière's fascination with the natural world is most evident in Breathe (2026), a permanent installation that opened with Hard Core. It draws on the ancient rocks of the Pilbara in Western Australia, home to some of the world's largest banded iron formations. These began forming around 2.4 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event, when photosynthesising microbes began releasing oxygen into Earth's oceans and atmosphere. Without this oxygen, complex life, including humans, may never have evolved.
Charrière describes Breathe as a kind of time machine. A reactor and electrolyser, developed with scientists, releases oxygen locked in the rocks into a circular chamber that visitors enter one at a time. For a brief moment, they are the only person on Earth breathing air that has been trapped in rock for more than two billion years. Geological history usually feels remote, but Breathe removes that distance.
Inside the Volcano
As a volcanologist, I was drawn to a cavernous space Charrière described as the "core" of his Hard Core exhibition. Surrounded by mirrored walls, this space rumbles, vibrates, and flashes with light, creating an unsettling sensation of standing inside a volcano. The space brings together several separate but interconnected works. A Stone Dream of You (2024) features sculptures made from real volcanic lava bombs—lumps of molten rock flung from a volcano—and polished obsidian spheres (volcanic glass). Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows (2020) is a striking sculpture made from shards of obsidian. Both sit alongside Stone Speakers, a 4D sound installation playing recordings from five different active volcanoes around the world. Though distinct, the works are arranged together to create the atmosphere of a volcanic caldera. Visitors can lie down and feel the seismic data resonating through the floor and their body—Earth's restless pulse made physical.
Rocks as Storytellers
A few other pieces kept me thinking after I left. In Atlas (2025), a Precambrian stromatolite is slowly polished into a sphere by rotating grinders. It was mesmerising, though I felt uneasy watching such an ancient object wear away. Another work, Soothsayer (2021), is a large lump of coal held at eye level in a steel scaffold, with a cavity big enough for a human head. Visitors are invited to stick their head in and breathe the air. This piece flips the idea of burying your head in the sand; it asks you to sit for a moment with the coal's deep past and the fossilised life it's made from.
Hard Core reminded me why I became a geologist. I love telling the stories of the extraordinary journeys rocks have been on—fragments of Earth's deep history preserved beneath our feet. Charrière goes one step further with this exhibition. His work highlights how humans are now part of those stories. We are not separate from the geological world but are actively reshaping it. Charrière invites us to see rocks differently: not as scenery, resources, or museum objects, but as storytellers carrying the history of the planet, and increasingly, our own.
Hard Core is showing at MONA until March 29, 2027.
