The Chronologer (Metal over Wood)

Edmund Husserl held that it is through “analogous mirrorings” of our own animate being that we are able to experience others as ‘alive’. Our perceptual mechanisms bind duration, growth and finitude with their actual immanent appearance to build a single, unified perception of a living person.

The sculpture presents to us this projected understanding of others, the ‘temporal skeleton’ that we know but do not actually see.

The changes that occur in our environment significantly adjust the meaning that we place on the its constituent entities so every moment of perception carries inferred ‘measurements’ concerning the position of the objects that we encounter within their respective life-narratives. It is in our nature to chronologize the World.

Of course, people change as well. We start as babies, grow into children and then adults, eventually becoming ‘old’. We ‘age’ like everything else and carry our own chronicle within us.

When I made this sculpture, I wanted to show a figure that both measures and is measured. Like us, the sculpture grows wider as it grows taller. The arms are similarly structured but they are outstretched and evoke an act of measuring.