The long wait by Isabella Martin on Uddenskulptur 2021
The landscape is always changing around us, in a long process full of abrupt motion and quiet accretion, stops and starts. When we stand in front of the rock, how do we imagine these timescales? The Long Wait explores the perpetual movement of the world, and our own attempts at trying to understand the deep time of our natural environment. Letters on the rockface spell out a text from Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Shells & Time’. The phrase is spoken by a shell lying on the seafloor millennia ago, as it witnesses the world taking shape around it. It describes the attempts by humans to decipher and explain, reading into the patterns of rocks the slow process of their formation, and thus the history of the earth. The Long Wait bridges the gap between the shell’s voice and what it describes, articulating this attempt to listen to our surroundings, and the thousand-year intervals of silence that often seem to occupy the time between then and now.
