Emma Jackson was delighted to be a finalist in the South Australian Museum’s Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize for Emerging Artists for KING PRAWN

The King Prawn was named for its unique shape. The area is known to geologists as the Gawler Craton, one of the oldest chunks of Australia, at over 3 billion years old. The oldest Archean rock (hot pink) that dapples its exoskeleton is only a hint of what lies beneath. It has a back vein of Paleoproterozoic rock (coral) which is rich in iron ore, and a volcanic abdomen (bright green) known as the Gawler Ranges. Like seeing animal shapes in the clouds, seeing this area of Craton as a prawn recasts geology as continually moving, albeit in deep time.