Tomasso & Willoughby Gerrish ~ Emily Young: Carving in Time - Catalog - Page 8
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Carving in Time, 2021
The first physical cultural traces of our hominin ancestors can be found in tools made of worked stone. Evidence
of these worked stone tools date back some 3.3 million years. They were unearthed from the shores of Lake
Turkana in Kenya.
Since then, over those millions of years, humankind’s cultures and our relationship with the planet can be
most clearly seen through the enduring material of stone. Any organic traces of manufactured objects soon
disappear as they degrade back into nature. Both in terms of objects and later, architecture, we can achieve some
understanding of ancient cultures, or, at the very least, some connection. The stories that have survived from
more recent stone remains are not so different from our more thoughtful contemporary preoccupations: our
survival, and our origins – and the desire to understand the source of the power/s of the universe we see around
us.
In the 1800s geologists were able to push back the plausible dates of the age of the planet by millions of years
by observing the fossil record, preserved in natural stone. This allowed Darwin for instance to formulate his
breakthrough theory of evolution, as the new time frame was so much deeper than previously understood.
(Bishop Usher in the 1700s had worked out that the world was created in 4004 BC according to biblical
texts). Thus the history of the Earth, and soon afterwards our knowledge of the age of our solar system, (4.5
billion years), our galaxy (13.4 billion years), and ultimately our universe (13.8 billion years) has been revealed
through studying the rocks beneath our feet.
"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
William Blake - Auguries of Innocence. 1803
In Greece, around three and a half thousand years ago, the European project of evidence based science and
logic began. The natural world became the subject of study, as did the nature of our humanity. Philosophy, logic
and mathematics flourished. The first anatomically correct sculptures of humans and animals were born in this
period. To understand a thing was to have some power over it. The study of the natural world, definitions of
classes of entities based on observation and evidence, of types of thinking, of modes of being, of philosophies
as ethical and reasonable life choices, all these were born then. The works carved in stone were probably the
most skilled ever to be produced. In other parts of the world similar exceptional ways of thinking were manifested in stone, Buddhist sculptures for instance.
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