Many years ago I dreamed:
Early morning in the city, few people around. Trams sidle into their station, ready to start the day. I drive into a bay. I will follow them. They start off and as I follow the road gets more and more rocky and narrow. Stones become boulders and all my forward motion is impeded. I get anxious and fearful… Then in the city, the broken down part, I see huge cranes lowering a long horizontal piece of stone into place.

It is an art work called the “Petrified Christ”.

PETRIFIED CHRIST
hardening, narrowing
final chapter of our Age
reaching culmination
anxiety peaking into terror
progress no longer possible
petrification of our highest value

impossibe transformation!
Christ now as an art work
highest value transformed
from within the frozen death of an age
art now the highest value of a new age

And more recently I dream:

I am building a cairn as an artwork. Someone else is building one as well and I notice he wraps a ‘skin of rock’ around a part of his cairn. Such skins are naturally formed when a rock is weathered and subject to intense variation in heat and cold, along with water getting trapped in cracks and splitting layers of the rock, etc. My dream companion is incorporating such a natural phenomenon into his art work to say something quite new..

ROCK-SKIN

cairn
once shrine of the dead
now an artwork

rock-skin
requiem for a possible future
a future dead before it is born

skin covering our material world
hardened into rock
like everything else
impenetrable solid

a living skin
is being prepared
as a possible future
to cover and reveal
each thing of our world
in the unique contours
of its self-originating light-
the light of this new skin

technology has killed
this living tissue of skin
and its life-giving light

the world is now covered
with technology’s skin
cruel parody
of the intended living skin

technology’s skin
is a plastic skin
hardening into a rock-skin
this plastic skin
stifling every living thing 

we cannot breathe
and we are dying
and so…
the artist must offer
a requiem for a possible future

My Accompanying Essay: Rock-Skin: Requium For A Possible Future

UPDATE (2023)

When I completed the art work in 2022:  video, poem and essay, I was working from intuition and in a sense did not know what I had produced. But I read an article today that broke open some understanding of the art work for me.

Here is a quote: 

In recent years, microplastics exploded into the public view as study after study has found that they’re quite literally everywhere: in the ocean, in the soil, and in our bodies…

The Article: “After Seeing This Terrifying Study…”