Limestone the colour of the plaster figures pulled out of Ain Ghazal, and basalt — the black volcanic stone of the Jordanian north, quarried whole and left rough.
Lime plaster over bundled reed. Eyes ringed in bitumen so the figures look back. Ten thousand years old, and still coming out of the ground the year he finished his degree. He has spent four decades answering them.
The stone arrives as it came out of the ground. What he adds is cast — a cage, a pair of horns, a cube, a bird — bolted to a surface he has left alone.
The stone work is the least photographed part of the practice and the hardest to move. A proper shoot is scheduled; several pieces stand in private gardens and are recorded here only once their owners have agreed.
Recovered from his own published captions, not written here. Dimensions in centimetres as he gave them. Where a year or a title was never published it is absent rather than estimated.
The stone is left exactly as it was quarried — one broken face, one weathered one. What sits on it is polished to a mirror. It stands on a black plinth at the edge of a pool, with the terraces and olive groves running away underneath.
