In 2005, Shannon wrote to me of the death of the great calligrapher Joan Rix Tebbutt. Almost in passing, she ended her letter: ‘I am coming to the end of a long haul with a collection of 10 bindings of George Mackay Brown’s poems, illustrated with Gunnie Moberg’s photographs beautifully printed by Mardersteig of Verona for [patrons] Colin Hamilton and Kulgin Duval. Each binding different from the other and hopefully to be exhibited in 2006 – but who knows!! Just to let you know I have not retired!’
Her 10 bindings of Mackay Brown’s Stone were indeed exhibited that year at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (and it is this series that was featured in the Crafts Council show). They remain one of the most ambitious sequences of bindings and accompanying boxes made in the 20th century, each box and binding an investigative recreation of stones as varied as basalt, quartz in greywacke, slate and phyllite.
While Shannon was working on the Stone bindings, there was a renewed interest in the Victorian polymath John Ruskin, whose powerful writings analysed geological structures in Turner’s paintings, and who had collected countless mineral specimens. During the 1980s, the term ‘scholar’s rocks’ was coined by the western art market to account for what historian Craig Clunas carefully described as ‘small unworked pieces of valued mineral, accessible to the eye and the hand and the ear’. Placed on carved wooden stands, these rocks were valued by the educated Chinese of the 17th century and earlier.