1 of 1 2 of 1 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter . Take a walk down Telford Avenue in Burnaby and you might find something unexpected: a series of huge boulders nestled on a side street.
It’s the newest public installation from legendary Vancouver artist and author Douglas Coupland. Titled 21st Century Rock Garden , the chunks of basalt and jade are arranged like a Japanese rock garden, called a karesansui . “We have all these really incredible rocks and minerals here in Vancouver slash British Columbia,” Coupland says on a call.
“And we never really think of them as objects.” Rocks are clearly a fascination of his. While they are mostly seen as resources to be extracted, Coupland argues that the geological formations themselves are gorgeous—and come with histories that stretch far beyond what humans can conceive of.
“The oldest rocks on earth that are still exposed are on the eastern shore of Hudson’s Bay. They’re about 4.3 billion years old; I don’t think our brains were meant to fully understand geological time,” he says in wonder, referencing the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in northern Quebec.
“It sort of blows your mind. And then you look at the jade here, for example: it’s got some milky streaks in it. At one point in history, x billion years ago, it was a molten, glowing, 4,000-degree celsius blob that was frozen in time, and became that rock.
” For his artwork, Coupland sourc.