Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest

Los Angeles Times

David L Ulin

Indeed, if “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks” has any anything to tell us, it is that in sharing these small, seemingly insignificant confidences, we find comfort, consolation, if not quite redemption that they are, as they have always been, the currency of our living, for good or ill.

The New Yorker

Nicola Twilley

“Bad Luck, Hot Rocks” is part of Thompson’s exploration of that relationship, in particular the significance that people attach to geologic oddities. In earlier projects, he has documented “meteorwrongs,” rocks initially identified as meteorites but later demoted to terrestrial status; glacial erratics, boulders left behind in foreign landscapes by melting ice; and an occult belief system built by a former I.B.M. research scientist around the geometries of quartz crystals. These peculiar interactions of man and mineral speak, Thompson believes, to the breakdown of human logic in the face of geologic time and space.

The Improbable

Jenn Witte

In Bad Luck, Hot Rocks, these letters are paired side-by-side with photographs of rocks from the “conscience pile” (returned rocks cannot be scattered back into the forest and are instead collected in a pile along a service road). The reader of these letters sits on the priest’s side of a confessional booth—a non-denominational one, sanctioned by the Parks Service. This offers a distinct and fascinating perspective: throw your problems next to something 200 million years old, step back, and take a look. As you read these painstakingly handwritten confessions, it is possible to see the thieves’ cancers and kidney stones in beautiful lumps of rock, trace broken marriages along cracks that were once tree rings, and feel something hard for fleeting moments…a funny thing. This book is timeless, as deep or as shallow as you want it to be.

Hyperallergic

Allison Meier

The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Some who pocketed a rock were later guilt-stricken into sending them back, and some even included letters of lamentation and curses. Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, published in November by the Ice Plant, is a photography and archive project by artists Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr to document these stolen fossils and their woeful apologies.

“They are beautiful, but I can’t enjoy them — they weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience,” one reads. “I can assure you that I have been smitten of conscience since I returned home and instead of pleasant memories of your park, I feel guilty,” wails another. Thompson first discovered these mea culpas during a visit to the park’s Rainbow Forest Museum in 2011, where a few of the “conscience letters” were on display. On further investigation, he found they were just a few from an archive of over 1,200 going back to 1934. The next year, he returned with Orr to photograph them in a collaborative project that’s now the Bad Luck, Hot Rocks book.

Dazed

Emma Elizabeth Davidson

Documenting the conscience letters written by those returning stolen rocks to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, ‘Bad Luck, Hot Rocks’ offers a uniquely touching insight into human nature and our relationship with the planet.

Midwest Book Review

Paul Vogel

Unique, informative, and extraordinary, "Bad Luck, Hot Rocks" is an unusual and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, community, college, and university library collections.