Richard Tipping - Everlasting Stone #21 - Time has Stopped

Paradiso, India  1990   
Granite, engraved text, goldleaf.  Dimensions: 11.2 x 18.6 x 2.0 cm

I learn from a web search that this is indeed from India: "Paradiso Classico Granite is a fine-grained, purple migmatite of the Precambrian period with dark grey-purple background sometimes with heavy grey-black veining and a lot of movement."  This small piece was given to me as a sample.  
The 'shadow' font creates letters through their absence, emphasised by goldleaf.
We know that time itself, whatever time is (for even with our mastery of physics we hardly know at all) cannot stop. Whose time has stopped? A being experiencing time, a subjective participant, a living consciousness (can there be consciousness not living? can a stone feel? is my mind real? The object states an impossible physical condition in a language made of emphatic shadows.

Richard Tipping - Everlasting Stone #17 - Within Without

 

Within You and Without You, 2007

Granite sheet on granite base, engraved text, goldleaf. H 55 x W 18 x 2 cm

on base 2 x 30 x 21 cm.

Shown at the solo exhibition Studio at Australian Galleries, Sydney, in 2012.

I'm glad Within Without didn't sell, as it's a pleasure to have in the studio. In fact, I've decided not to sell any of my remaining Everlasting Stones, of which there must be at least fifty in various corners and on shelves. You can reach a point where the speaking-to-you 'thingness' of a sculpture becomes a necessary presence, a marker in the flux, a constant re-iteration of complexities. Those who like their poems to be stories will find all this somewhere between puzzling and appalling. Why would anyone spend so much time inside words, feeling their depths and crags, mountain climbing syllables, diving into pools of vowels? Using symmetrical letters, splitting the word vertically, creating filled emptiness.

If you remove the 'H' and re-arrange words, there is easily 'out wit' there - but that's a distraction. 

As George Harrison's song says: "Life goes on within you and without you"

See various recordings and covers on YouTube for example.

There's also a great Patti Smith version of Within Without You:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrCk5ZWt3a8