The Rock Cycle

The Rock Cycle is a collaboration between the poet Josh Ascherman and the visual artist Ali Vaughan. In 2022, they began a series of conversations initiated by a group of graphite drawings Vaughan produced in 2021. In response to the drawings and regular conversations with Vaughan, Ascherman wrote a longform, durational—but fragmentary—poem. As the collaboration progressed over many months, Vaughan and Ascherman developed an exchange that stretched beyond the initial goals for the project, sharing books, articles, and poems which eventually constituted a landscape of mutual references between the two artists.

In late 2023, Vaughan and Ascherman connected with the artist Harry Cole, who became a third member in their collaboration. The three worked closely for months to design a print edition of The Rock Cycle, which included reproductions of Vaughan’s drawings, Ascherman’s poetry, and quotations from the bibliography of their shared references (which included W.G. Sebald, Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, and Ree Morton, to name a few) printed on alternating layers of paper and transparent vellum. Cole created each book in the edition of 20 by hand, from screen printing and gluing the covers to hand binding each book’s spine.