Artist-scholar Jessica Bardsley talks to us about her film The Making and Unmaking of the Earth (2018), which can be considered an experiment in finding imagery for both personal and collective pain. Her fluid approach to understanding the self and the environment combines found footage of geological phenomena with personal histories. We discuss a black stone that appears in her film as the example of an object which fosters an open-ended attachment, pointing toward qualities of the self that remain elusive, or perhaps to nothing at all.