Looking the Right Way

A while ago, a friend shared this pebble alphabet by Belgian designer Clotilde Olyff. Amazing! I said, assuming the image was Photoshopped. But no, it turns out that Olyff, a typography designer, spent 14 years collecting real, actual pebbles off the banks of rivers and beaches. That is dedication!

Here is an extract from Jan Middendorp’s essay Lettered (2000) about Olyff’s alphabet of stones:

Clotilde Olyff is no reader. She is not at ease with sentences, and not particularly fond of words. She is troubled by letters when arrayed for battle, preparing to strike the reader as useful information or gripping ideas. But she is positively in love with the letter as an individual, fascinated by the infinite possibilities in suggesting its forms, eager to discover its features in the faces of strangers. Even though she makes a living by creating and re-creating letters, the way we perceive these forms continues to fill her with wonder.

Is it our obsession with communication that makes us look for the alphabet in the simplest of forms – circles, triangles, squares? Does it take a particular type of madness to comb the beaches of Les Landes in search of letters created, so casually, by the forces of nature and time?

The pebbles Clotilde Olyff discovers are the product of chance, yet they seem made to be singled out; to be recognized as faces … typefaces or human faces. Like a child pointing out oddly-shaped clouds, Clotilde Olyff shows us that nature can imitate art, instead of the other way round – if you look at it the right way.

The entire natural world is full of wonder indeed – if you look at it the right way.