Petrified Time

I took an olive root — witness to more than a single century — and did to it what stone does to time: I stopped it.

The tree grew slowly, by its own laws, spending decades assembling smooth, flowing lines. I cut that fluidity into facets — with chisel and sanding, introducing a sharp angle, a flat surface, a clean-edged cut where before there had only been a curve. I wanted the organic mass to begin to look as though time had worked on it not as a gardener, but as a geologist: compressing it, crystallizing it, turning growth into structure. The form ceases to read as a piece of wood and begins to seem like a mineral — a fragment of rock in which something once living had frozen forever.

What matters to me is precisely this conflict: the warm, uneven texture of the olive wood against the cold, sterile planes of geometry cut into it by my own hand. These are two different kinds of time within a single volume — the slow, organic time of growth, and the instantaneous, irreversible time of petrification, which I set into place with every cut. The opening that pierces the upper part is not a metaphor but a point where time seemingly ran out before the form could be told to its end: the mass simply vanishes, and the viewer looks not at the wood but through it, into the emptiness left behind by growth brought to a halt.

The stillness of this sculpture is deceptive. It is not finished — it is caught. It is precisely that moment, when the living had not yet fully become stone, that I have left on view.