The structure of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is cut directly into Hobart’s Berriedale Peninsula – walls carved from roughly 250-million-year-old sandstone that formed when Tasmania was still part of the supercontinent Gondwana.

It’s the perfect setting for Berlin-based French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s latest exhibit, Hard Core. This is not just an exhibition about rocks. It is about how we humans fit into deep time, and how we dig up, reshape and use rocks that took millions of years to form.

Viewed through an earth scientist’s eyes, Charrière’s sprawling exhibition feels like an abstract field trip, moving between ancient rocks, glacial boulders, volcanic products, and the materials that underpin modern life.

Humans as a geological force

Many of Charrière’s works explore a simple but powerful idea: the things we consume are bound to deep time. The rocks, minerals and metals underpinning modern life took thousands to millions of years to form, yet we extract them in an instant.

The first work is Not All Who Wander Are Lost (2019). It shows four glacial erratics: boulders carried by glacial ice and deposited far away from where they formed. The name derives from the latin errare, which means “to wander”.

The boulders, roughly waist to chest high, were all collected from the same........

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