Verba Sacra Aeterna III

We humans speak surprisingly often of eternity.

Of eternal love. Eternal life. Eternal remembrance. We promise each other things forever and try to imagine a time that never ends.

And yet we cannot truly comprehend eternity.

Our minds understand beginnings and endings. Birth and death. Yesterday and tomorrow. Even a very long life remains a finite stretch on a timeline. Eternity, by contrast, has no scale by which we can measure it.

And still, we search for it.

Perhaps we hope it begins just around the next corner.

Eternity Around the Corner is my attempt to give form to this contradiction.

The piece is made of black ceramic, fossilised wood and luminous pigment. The wood comes from a world that, to the human mind, already lies almost beyond imaginable time. Trees stood on this Earth when dinosaurs walked among them. What once lived became stone – and endured spans of time against which a human life is little more than a moment.

Of course, even that is not eternity.

But perhaps it is one of the few things we can hold in our hands that can give us at least a glimpse of it.

The ring’s raw, almost archaic form therefore does not attempt to represent eternity. That would be impossible. It leaves something open. A passage. A corner. A space we can see but never fully grasp.

And even when the light disappears, something remains: the pigment embedded within it continues to glow in the dark.

Eternity remains beyond our grasp.
But humanity will probably never stop searching for it around the next corner.

Eternity Around the Corner (Ad aeternam) is the third work in the Verba Sacra Aeterna series. The series explores words to which people have, for centuries, given meaning that reaches beyond the individual life – faith, time, transience, and the human attempt to give language to the incomprehensible.