Chronoliths

The implacable, barely imaginable stones that mark the European Neolithic’s eons-long conversation with the future have inspired much of my own thinking about the intersections of material culture, ideas, and time. Added to that mix are the various symbolic carvings, paintings, and traces left on cave walls, on bone, and on bouldered promontories, dating from as far back as 40 000 to 50 000 years. Despite extensive linguistic, anthropological, and archaeological explorations, these communications remain as vacant of meaning to us contemporaries as do the fields of Carnac in France or Stonehenge in England, or Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. 

This work—Chronoliths—explores the larger semiotic universe within which these phenomena thrive. To complicate matters, each was carved with the aid of an eight-thousand years-old stone blade and inscribed with some of the 32 common symbols that Genevieve Von Petzinger has identified as arguably the oldest common symbolic vocabulary of mankind. 

We have no idea what any of this means. And yet.

Stoneware. Chronoliths. 2024. Chronolith 1 (21.6 x 8 cm); Chronolith 2 (10.5 x 9.5 cm); Chronolith 3 (20.1 x 6 cm).

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