I have been working with this ancient analog for a month and the result is displayed here at the Bruno Leon Gallery.

I have worked this material with a small cutting point driven by air pressure. It has moved me, my hands and mind, as much as I have moved it. The stone and I have collaborated closely. We have become used to each other. We have come to an understanding.

In that collaboration, I have come to understand alabaster as "thick water". Alabaster has the quality of being fluid. For me it moves and it flows. It has a life. Not like ice, not like cream, not like paste, not like fresh concrete. Like water that is thick.

It is a thick water that envelopes me. It surrounds me, it responds to my touch and it reveals to me the dissolved life from which it is made. It reveals the algae, the soluble life of 8 million years ago, and it reveals a memory of human existence since.

This thick water passes before my eyes and creates a molecular filter for light and translucence, colour and substance. I can see the layers of molecules and the structure of the material. I can sense the logic of the structures as I excavate spaces and expose connections.

As the alabaster and I persisted in working together over the last month, our relationship intensified. In the time, the alabaster has revealed its nature and permitted a vision to emerge of our present.

That vision reveals a great deal. The outcome of my work reveals the creation, the very formation, of the alabaster itself. It reveals an essence of the creation of the alabaster in pools of soluble life. And it also reveals the coincidental and parallel emergence of humans.