BOOK OF MICA
An ongoing body of work at the threshold where painting begins to behave like geology
Micah Heimlich has worked with mica for more than a decade, first incorporating the mineral into furniture, decorative windows, and lighting. In Book of Mica, the material moves from architectural surface to pictorial medium. Techniques drawn from sand painting, collage, and ceramics allow each work to hover between design and art, intention and chance.
Mica’s layered structure and shifting luster carry a long cultural history. Cleaved into thin sheets, it catches and releases light while retaining the visual memory of stone. Heimlich uses those inherent qualities as the basis of a painting practice. Pigment, powder, fragments, and translucent layers accumulate into surfaces that appear geological rather than merely descriptive.
The works resist a stable reading. Some suggest landscapes, specimens, mineral sections, or distant astronomical events; others remain resolutely abstract. Their forms feel less illustrated than discovered, as though pressure, heat, and time had produced them. The boundary between image and material becomes difficult to locate.
In The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois considered the strange resemblance between natural formations and human images. Book of Mica occupies a related territory. Its paintings do not imitate geology so much as allow matter to participate in making the image. Each layer conceals and reveals another, turning the mineral into both subject and method.
The result is a body of work grounded in the earth yet unstable in perception—at once ancient and immediate, deliberate and accidental, luminous and opaque.
Condensed from an essay by Paul Foss
The Archive
