Monday Inspiration ✨
Artist: Lydia Jenkins Musco
Lydia Jenkins Musco works with integrally pigmented hand-cast concrete in the woodlands of Massachusetts, building sculptures the way landscapes form—through accumulation, layering, and time.
Her Unconformity series takes its name from geology. An unconformity is a break in the geological record, a boundary between rock layers caused by erosion or a pause in sediment accumulation. It’s the gap that creates meaning between strata, separating one era from another. Lydia builds these breaks in time as physical objects.
Each sculpture documents a single place across the course of a year—capturing changing color, light, and forms from the Massachusetts woodlands. She casts concrete in movable sections that stack and influence each other the way sedimentary layers do. The work is built from the ground up, bound by gravity only, echoing how geological strata compress fragments over millions of years.
But here’s where it becomes collage thinking: her sculptures can be dismantled and reassembled in different configurations. Same pieces, new arrangement, meaning reshaped by how the fragments relate to each other. Each reassembly tells a new story. The weight is permanent but the narrative isn’t.
Strata are just layers of fragments pressed together over time. That’s geology. That’s also collage—just happening at different speeds. Lydia compresses geological time into concrete you can walk around, touch, and reconfigure. Time becomes construction material. Unconformities become sculpture.
Text by Max-o-matic
