Steven Whiffen
objects of art
About fifty thousand years ago a tsunami felled a lot of giant kauri trees, into the swamps of Northern NZ. There they remained, preserved, for the rest of modern human evolution!
The chatoyant timber sits in a 24 karat gold finished dome, painstakingly inlaid into a stone I found at the beach, made of volcanic flows that have entered older, sedimentary rock.
When one holds that orb of ancient sunshine, contemplates the numbers and realizes the young rock is about 65 million years old, the gold only 25 million, and the miraculously preserved timber is 50,000 years old, there's a line, through forming forests and every successful ape, all the way to the viewer. Our planet is precious, it's ancient forests and other ecosystems are delicately balanced in time. Human activity is, thus far, a blip in natures time line.