Ten Thousand Years

When my huge drawing of a tree’s rings was accidentally wrecked, I was devastated. I could only think to cut up the remains into pieces and shove them away in a box. 18 months later I rediscovered them and gave them a new life in the Ten Thousand Years collages.

The tree of the original drawing is now transformed into lumber, the history recorded in its rings is now chopped and sectioned, its chronology lost. I imagine the all the paintings ever made in this part of the world, the drawings, the poetry, the stories—also felled, broken, and scrambled.

And yet, after any crisis, we rebuild. New forms come together, reassembled from pieces of the old drawing. They may seem unstable—do these new structures have a future?