Chronicles of Beginning

Description

I see in this root not a single moment, but an entire sequence — the way the rings of a trunk hold its whole life, if you know where to look. I merely cleared it: removed the excess mass that concealed the transitions between layers — and the book that had fallen open on all its pages at once became legible.

At the bottom, at the base, the wood is still dense, almost solid — a form not yet separated from the formless mass it grew out of. Higher up, the mass breaks apart into streams: trunks diverge, and openings appear between them — passages through — growth caught in the very moment of division. And higher still, individual branches stretch far forward, outrunning one another — movement at its limit, already almost torn free from the shared trunk. Three states, three ages of the same matter — and none replaces another; all of them hold here simultaneously, the way everything this root has ever been holds simultaneously.

I do not choose between growth and memory — here both exist at once, folded into each other so tightly that they cease to be different things. Each new layer lay down over the previous one, not erasing it but preserving it — I only made sure my carving did not disturb that preservation.

I chose the marble slab as a threshold between two kinds of time. Stone exists in a single, unchanging present — it will be, an hour from now and a hundred years from now, the very same marble. But the wood above it lives in all its ages at once, as though time for it does not move in a straight line but all happened at once, in one long, never-ending moment.

Haiku by the artist:

From stone’s silent void
The tree dreams itself alive…
Chronicles of Beginning.

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