The work isolates the familiar gesture of rubbing a stone to make a wish, detaching it from the cultural and superstitious frameworks that typically legitimize the act. A stone—presented in its unrefined, unrelocated state—functions purely as material, stripped of the symbolic charge that often accompanies ritual objects. Within this pared-down configuration, the hands perform the habitual action, but without the narrative or metaphysical expectations that usually sustain it.

By suspending the gesture from its conventional purpose, the work exposes the physical mechanics of the act: friction, pressure, repetition, and the minor adjustments of skin against mineral surface. Once deprived of its “meaning,” the gesture appears oddly vacant, its authority destabilized. Stone Rubbing examines this moment of estrangement, proposing that the act’s power resides less in belief than in the material choreography of the body itself.