Sixty million and forty years
1982 / 2022

Sixty million and forty years, 1982 / 2022, child’s drawing, wax crayon, pencil, acrylic and oil on paper, petrified leaves which fell approximately 60 million years ago, 100 x 90 x 30 cm

Forty years have gone by between the two drawings of leaves. One was drawn by the artist at the age of four, while the other was created at the age of 44. The sixty million years represented by the petrified fragment of forest litter stand in contrast with those forty years. The impossibility of understanding and interpreting deep time reflects the anthropological limitation of the human perception of time. The human brain developed into its present condition in an era when people were involved with their surrounding environment and immediate dangers. Thus human beings of today place the short-term consequences of an action and the immediate future in the focus of their thinking. Time is the mixed totality and fusion of changes, namely timelines, at different speeds. Natural and social systems are connected to human identity in different timescales. The monumentality of the deep time of geological and planetary phenomena far exceeds the timescale of the human being, even of the human race. As a consequence of human evolution, the human being cannot interpret the heterogeneous timescale, with the only exception being the close connections of cause and effect. This limited perception fundamentally influences the discourse about the anthropocene, the ecological crisis and mass extinction, although we live in a geological era created by ourselves.

Sixty million and forty years, 1982 / 2022, child’s drawing, wax crayon, pencil, acrylic and oil on paper, petrified leaves which fell approximately 60 million years ago, 100 x 90 x 30 cm, detail

Sixty million and forty years, 1982 / 2022, child’s drawing, wax crayon, pencil, acrylic and oil on paper, petrified leaves which fell approximately 60 million years ago, 100 x 90 x 30 cm

Sixty million and forty years, 1982 / 2022, child’s drawing, wax crayon, pencil, acrylic and oil on paper, petrified leaves which fell approximately 60 million years ago, 100 x 90 x 30 cm, detail

Sixty million and forty years, 1982 / 2022, child’s drawing, wax crayon, pencil, acrylic and oil on paper, petrified leaves which fell approximately 60 million years ago, 100 x 90 x 30 cm, detail