Maura Doyle's latest art project sat around for 12,000 years before she finally got it started.
Still, she moved pretty quickly in geological terms: The piece is a billion-year-old boulder that spent the past 12,000 years -- the equivalent to a mere three hours in the life of 31-year-old Ms. Doyle -- near Bobcaygeon, Ont.
If she hadn't snapped it up last month and hauled it to the city, who knows where it might have ended up? Rocks, after all, have a habit of moving around, as this one did all those eons ago.
It takes a wide mind to make room for concepts like these, let alone the artistic merits of a 9,163-kilogram chunk of common Ontario granite, plunked down in a tiny, hemmed-in downtown sculpture park.
Ms. Doyle, possessed of just such a mind, will find out who shares her interests during her six-month show, There's A New Boulder In Town, which runs until April 15 at the Toronto Sculpture Garden on King Street East just east of Church Street.
With any luck, visitors will see enough of what she sees to buy a $5 copy of her companion guidebook, which lists 20 other "prehistoric souvenirs" Ms. Doyle has found and photographed while cycling around Toronto over the past seven years.
They include a boulder at Bloor and St. George Streets, unearthed during recent construction of the Woodsworth College student residence at the University of Toronto; a massive rock found in a Rosedale backyard and donated to the U of T geology department's outdoor collection; and the large black stone perched upright outside Lord Lansdowne Public School on Spadina Crescent.
To far younger humans, they are nothing more than big old rocks sitting still on the ground, so "most people just walk by them without thinking about it," Ms. Doyle says.
Few may realize they are, in fact, restless rolling stones called "erratics," geological orphans plucked from faraway homes during ancient geological upheavals and dropped here practically yesterday, if you can take the long view.
"You don't think of a rock as something that wanders because it's so heavy and big," Ms. Doyle says, sitting on a bench at the sculpture park recently. "It's nice to think of an erratic rock moving around the planet. It sort of collapses time."
The behemoth boulder she chose for her installation could collapse a lot more than that if it landed in the wrong place. Perched on the edge of the park's walkway, the oblong, pinkish-grey rock is 2.5 metres long and roughly 1.7 metres in height and width.
She found it in a limestone quarry last month while on a scouting mission in the Peterborough area, with guidance from James Brenan, a U of T geologist. Dr. Brenan says the boulder was born farther north, then picked up and dropped near Bobcaygeon by glaciers that crept over Central Canada during the last ice age.
The same goes for most of the boulders that dot the city today, some of which still sit where the ice left them, others moved by people to decorate the lawns of homes, businesses, even graves. A. P. Coleman, a noted Canadian glacial geologist who died in 1939, chose a chunk of Muskoka granite to mark his burial plot in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
Excited as a geologist should be about rocks, Dr. Brenan admits that even he was "initially a little surprised" when Ms. Doyle approached him for advice. He is well aware that rocks are the Rodney Dangerfield of the natural world, earning little respect alongside animals, plants and the Earth's more dramatic physical features. This effect is all the more pronounced in a large city.
"The hand of man is fairly strong in a place like Toronto," Dr. Brenan says. "There's very little of the original natural environment left around here, but if you dig, there's all sorts of examples of this type of material that underlies Toronto."
In more modern terms, rocks are also a significant underpinning of the city's economy, since Canada's biggest mining deals are usually brokered here.
Ms. Doyle's means of making a living are decidedly less conventional; she lives, in part, on donations to a "money collection" that she holds forth as a continuing project. Many of her works -- from a ball of chewed gum to a planned helicopter drop of 10,000 empty potato chip bags into the SkyDome -- are less about the material than their creative presentation.
Her boulder exhibit falls into the same category, and when it ends in April, she hopes to come away with a little more than artistic satisfaction.
"I'm hoping I'm going to sell it for less than 50 cents a pound," she says.
That works out to the not insignificant sum of $10,000, but she's prepared to throw in a bonus: "Free delivery from April 15 to 20, within 200 kilometres of Toronto."
And the rock, immovable as it might look, will roll again.