Etchings and Accretions explore the inimitable petrifying waters of Rome and the depositional affairs of calcium carbonate in its fountains, aqueducts, and quotidian plumbing; tendering an elegy to the evanescing character of these waters and their bacterial companions. We have been taught to regard stone as inert, lifeless, and immutable, but the emergence of geomicrobiology as a scientific discipline has unveiled the involvement of microorganisms in geological and geochemical processes, fomenting an indivisible relationship between the living and non-living. Microbial life not only influences the formation of stone, it composes it. If we imagine the founding of Rome in geomicrobial terms, the city began, not in 753 BCE with mythical demigods suckling a she-wolf, but millions of years earlier in a sedimentary adagio of bacteria and skeletal remains that settled on the seafloor and around the mouths of mineral springs, resolving through compaction into a calcareous family of limestones. 

Heather Scott Peterson is an artist, designer, essayist, curator, and educator. Her work explores the idioms of matter and its various behaviours as the substances that compose the world. Across her creative career she has made work in nearly every art and design discipline, maintaining a studio practice which has also functioned as a design/build atelier and a conceptual consultancy. From 2023-2024 she was Director of Not There Gallery in Los Angeles. She has been a MacDowell fellow, a resident of the Instituto Internazionale di Architettura, and a founding member of Fünf Design Collective. She received a BFA in painting and art history from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in creative writing from Brown University and holds a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She is a Professor of Architecture and Design at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.