ARTISTS

I began digging into "strata" because I was making gravestones.
In Japan, funerary rites—shaped by the Edo-period danka system—have long provided the framework through which the presence of the dead is defined, in what is often called "funeral Buddhism." Yet with shifts in religious sensibilities, increasing individualization, and a declining and aging population, I found myself wanting to reconsider how absence might be expressed in Japan today. That impulse is what first led me to make gravestones.
What I unexpectedly confronted in the process, however, was the fact of forgetting—and the self-evident truth that countless dead lie buried, while most of us, too, will eventually be forgotten. The act of "digging into strata" began as an attitude toward an invisible, immense history: a way of seeking how to confirm the existence of those innumerable ones who can no longer exist.

In 1788, the geological time that James Hutton discovered through the unconformity at Siccar Point—deep time—was not a "past" within human temporal perception, but the discovery of an outside that cannot be recalled. And yet, strata, like us, possess their own histories down to each single grain of sand. What appears to humans as a result is, in deep time, a process; weathering is becoming; it is not forgetting, but transformation.

Just as the calcium that composes our bones once drifted in the sea as foraminifera, and just as the iron in our blood was forged by stellar explosions, we quite literally stand upon deep time. Perhaps we find beauty—and a slight consolation—in strata because, living as we do within overwhelmingly short spans of time, we are, through them, touching a self that exists within a deep time where there is no concept of loss. If we dig beneath our feet, strata teach us that it is certainly there.

Teppei Miyake