Stone jewels

Sheffield seems to be in a constant state of redevelopment. Last time I went, the Millennium Galleries had just opened; now they’re already history, overtaken by newer developments that have turned the walk from the station into a rat maze of roadworks. But the maze is worth negotiating for the reward of Art at the Rockface, the Millennium Galleries’ latest exhibition.

A joint venture with Norwich Castle Museum, Art at the Rockface is a literal blockbuster — an exhibition exploring art’s fascination with stone. Its scope is extraordinarily ambitious: its 200 ‘rock samples’ range in scale from the Crown Jewels in a Beaton photograph of The Queen to Mount Fuji in a print by Hokusai, and in time from a Montastruc caveman’s 12,500-year-old sketch of horses to a Richard Long Cornish slate spiral dated 1981 (the slate itself is 350 million years old). If the show succeeds, it must be because John Ruskin — whose lifelong passions for art and geology it unites — is smiling down on it.