Fifty million year old fossilized shark vertebrae, copper and blued iron with silver and alluvial gold.
I had to hit this thing with a hammer over eight thousand times! When you hold it, perhaps in your palm, maybe to carefully remove the crumbling fifty million year old shark vertebrae, you are touching blued iron, from deposits formed nearly two billion years ago. That vertebrae also reveals a tiny flake of gold, nestling loose in a bed of copper verdigris, also able to be removed and independently contemplated. It took me two days of hard work to wrestle that thing from the clutches of an icy river bed! How we experience the passing of time is deeply connected to our sense of mortality. Having stood in front of Hirst's 'shark', what seems like a very long time ago, it seemed fitting to play on words with t/his title.