This is Our Life
Signed verso acrylic on cleft and carved ash wood in five parts.
Gifted to Wenham in 2018, half a slice from an enormous ash tree, which had to be felled after becoming unsafe.
Lettering on the end-grain would not be possible, so it was split into segments. Unexpectedly, these had curved sides, because the piece came from the branch, not the trunk, and so had grown asymmetrically. Various possibilities came to mind for short phrases, but in the end Wenham went back to what he regards as the seven most significant lines of poetry written in the twentieth century, from the last part of Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot. They seem to sum up what in outline a fulfilled life is like.
When the blocks are together, they are like our own biographies: you can read nothing from the outside, and only by exploring can the story be read, piece by piece.
Gifted to Wenham in 2018, half a slice from an enormous ash tree, which had to be felled after becoming unsafe.
Lettering on the end-grain would not be possible, so it was split into segments. Unexpectedly, these had curved sides, because the piece came from the branch, not the trunk, and so had grown asymmetrically. Various possibilities came to mind for short phrases, but in the end Wenham went back to what he regards as the seven most significant lines of poetry written in the twentieth century, from the last part of Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot. They seem to sum up what in outline a fulfilled life is like.
When the blocks are together, they are like our own biographies: you can read nothing from the outside, and only by exploring can the story be read, piece by piece.
$4,460.27
This is Our Life—
$4,460.27
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Description
Signed verso acrylic on cleft and carved ash wood in five parts.
Gifted to Wenham in 2018, half a slice from an enormous ash tree, which had to be felled after becoming unsafe.
Lettering on the end-grain would not be possible, so it was split into segments. Unexpectedly, these had curved sides, because the piece came from the branch, not the trunk, and so had grown asymmetrically. Various possibilities came to mind for short phrases, but in the end Wenham went back to what he regards as the seven most significant lines of poetry written in the twentieth century, from the last part of Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot. They seem to sum up what in outline a fulfilled life is like.
When the blocks are together, they are like our own biographies: you can read nothing from the outside, and only by exploring can the story be read, piece by piece.
Gifted to Wenham in 2018, half a slice from an enormous ash tree, which had to be felled after becoming unsafe.
Lettering on the end-grain would not be possible, so it was split into segments. Unexpectedly, these had curved sides, because the piece came from the branch, not the trunk, and so had grown asymmetrically. Various possibilities came to mind for short phrases, but in the end Wenham went back to what he regards as the seven most significant lines of poetry written in the twentieth century, from the last part of Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot. They seem to sum up what in outline a fulfilled life is like.
When the blocks are together, they are like our own biographies: you can read nothing from the outside, and only by exploring can the story be read, piece by piece.
