Tomasso & Willoughby Gerrish ~ Emily Young: Carving in Time - Catalog - Page 9
The twenty first century finds us in a philosophical and environmental chaos, a kind of nightmare in a
potential paradise. Technology and ethics fight for the middle ground, while around the world the land literally burns, floods destroy, and the heating seas become dangerous to life: the old waterways run dry, glaciers
and poles melt. It’s plausible, we are told, that in the years to come, humankind’s numbers will dwindle, possibly to extinction: technology may save a few of us. Many of our descendants and our fellow creatures and life
forms on Earth will be lost in the future times of heavy climatic pollution - climate chaos: brought on by us,
humans living now. Maybe not, maybe the world will be mended again. Both possibilities are real, a completely new experience for humans, and the stories of destruction are incomprehensible and terrifying. Cassandra
lives again.
In centuries or millennia to come, who will still live on Earth? Who will look back at us and read signs of
our lives and civilisations? What will they see? What will they, or it, understand of us? Stones carved in
this contemporary world have a good chance of enduring into unknowable futures, where, like the stone
carvings and buildings we see now from thousands of years in the past, they’ll bear some kind of witness to us.
A stone carver can put into the working of the stone their thoughts, questions, dreams. Those carvers
from history, across the globe, with skill and poetic justification, live on with us now, telling us
elements of their thoughts, questions and dreams. Carved stone manifests the purposes of art, of
poetry, in cultures around the world throughout human history. Stone endures. It can hold beauty for us.
These are the thoughts that now run through my life and work, and which I carve into stone. In nature, stone
can tell us more than we knew we knew: the fossil record has allowed us to see into the geological past, and
it’s shown us how to look further out, into deep space and deep time; we get a sense of how big is our world,
and our universe. And also it’s shown us how to look further in, into the nature of matter, energy, time, and
consciousness: both, outwards and inwards, shown us how little we know, how little we are. How we stand at
a convergence of these two realities, the vast outside, and the unimaginably small, marrying them together in
our human endeavours.
The stones worked those thousands of years ago, Greek, Etruscan, Roman, carry the power of the first essays
into manifesting extremely complex realities, a culture that tore through the whole of the Mediterranean and
left a vast amount of carved and built stone for us now to admire, wonder at and treasure. It’s the reason I live
on the Tyrrehnian coast of western Italy, watching the seas where Odysseus sailed. It’s not so long ago, from my
point of view, compared to the billions of years since the creation of our universe. I claim the Archaic Greek
sculptors as my teachers, my guides. Look in, to your mind and heart, look out, to the star-studded night sky,
and keep looking. It’s the only thing that begins to make sense.
There are profound mysteries in our lives, where we’re blind and helpless in the face of nature. We have to see
ourselves, as the saying goes, through a glass darkly. To carve a thoughtfulness into a stone, and bring the touch
of a human life, a dream of beauty, of compassion, to a rock, whose existence is so wild, so simple and so much
more ancient than ours, is a call, a bleat, into the future from us, now. The ancient Greeks still call to us from
their time just as I desire my work to call to some unknowable future.
Emily Young Santa Croce 2021
WILLOUGHBY GERRISH
9
