Set in Stone

Emily Young

1st November, 2007

The loveliness, power and strength in stone is the raw beauty of Nature herself. In every piece of stone there is a story told more magnificent than any creation myth; a story that shocked and astonished the Christian geologists of late-1700s England when they first started to decipher, through the fossil record, the history of life on Earth.

Through learning to read the tracks and traces of the cataclysmic and remorseless geological changes that formed the planet, a story was uncovered that led directly to the computing of the true age of the Earth, the solar system, our galaxy and the universe. The science we depend upon for our everyday lives is tied inextricably to that ability to read the fossil record, the stone and the land.

Stones – so slow, silent and long-lived – are made, like us, of particles that were born in starbursts, in galactic winds, in our first Big Bang. There’s a poetry in them. They whisper to us about things older than we can conceive, gloriously mysterious yet hard and real. We can touch them with our hands, look into them with a microscope, and they reveal their stories, encouraging us to consider the brevity of our incarnation here on Earth.

And now, in this millennium, I make my mark on them, creating familiar forms, carrying an emotional charge. The heads I carve have the demeanor of wildness, gravity and beneficence. The discs are like heavenly bodies, stars, whirling in dark space, carrying information about our origins and throwing out light to us. So I call these works – both the heads and the...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login