Chronoliths

Chronoliths is a group of black stoneware objects made in the long shadow of the marks, monuments, and material traces that survive from deep prehistory.

Across cave walls, worked bone, stone, and landscape, signs persist long after the systems of meaning that produced them have disappeared. We can locate them, classify them, compare them, count their recurrence. We can say a great deal about them. What they meant remains largely—if not entirely—beyond reach.

And will almost assuredly remain so.

The Chronoliths begin there and move elsewhere. Each was carved with the aid of a ten-thousand-year-old stone blade and inscribed with signs drawn from the recurring symbolic repertoire of the Upper Palaeolithic. They are contemporary objects carrying very old marks: deliberately displaced things that collapse archaeological time into the present.

The work is concerned less with recovering a lost meaning than with what survives when meaning is gone—the persistence of the sign, the authority of the object, and our continuing impulse to read significance into matter that refuses to explain itself.