Collection: Weathered Time

A pine can spend three hundred years dying and not finish. The bark dies back around most of the trunk until one narrow strip of living tissue is left running up the sheltered side, and the tree puts everything through that one vein. The dead wood beside it keeps getting sanded down by wind and ice, so the trunk ends up in two colors — the part still working, and the part that stopped.

This is the work where you can see how long something took. Sap in layers, because the tree bled here more than once. Lichen a few inches across that started before anyone now living. A nest added to season after season, on a cliff already marked by people who came through hundreds of years ago.

Nothing here was arranged or cleaned up.

Lichen grows about half a millimetre a year. Geologists date rock surfaces by measuring it.