Chronicles of Beginning

Description

Wood That Remembers: A Handcarved Biomorphic Abstract Olive Wood Sculpture

In this root, I see not a single moment but an entire sequence — the way a trunk’s rings hold its whole life, if you know where to look. I only cleared it: removing the excess mass that hid the transitions between layers. Like a dropped book that fell open on every page at once, it became readable.

Three Ages of One Substance

At the base, the wood is still dense, almost solid — a form not yet separated from the shapeless mass it grew from. Higher up, the mass breaks into streams: trunks diverge, and openings appear between them — growth caught mid-split. Right at the top, individual branches stretch far forward, overtaking one another — motion at its limit, almost torn free from the shared trunk, giving the whole piece a distinctly biomorphic quality.

Three states, three ages of the same substance — and none replaces another. They all hold together at once, the way everything this root has ever been holds together at once.

Growth and Memory Together

I don’t choose between growth and memory — here, both exist at once, folded into each other so tightly they stop being separate things. Each new layer settled over the last without erasing it, only preserving it. My only task was to carve without breaking that preservation.

Marble as a Threshold Between Two Times

I chose the marble slab as a threshold between two kinds of time. Stone exists in a single, unchanging present — it was the same an hour ago and will be the same in a hundred years. The wood above it, though, lives through all its ages at once, as if this biomorphic sculpture doesn’t move along a straight line of time at all, but happens all together, in one long, never-ending moment.

Additional information

Weight	13 kg
Dimensions	46 × 61 × 44 cm
Artist	Hanko
Material	Olive root (Olea europaea), ~400 years. Base: white marble
Year	2019
Edition	1/1 — unique work
Technique	Wood carving, hand polishing, preservation of natural curves.

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