Petrified Times 2020

Petrified Times, 2020–2025, newsprint from The New York Times

This sculpture has been meticulously constructed out of newspapers to resemble a tree trunk, with each layer made from individual pages applied one at a time. Like other works in this exhibition, Petrified Timesseeks to reconnect everyday experiences with wider natural processes in the environment.

By painstakingly turning an entire one-year volume of The New York Times back into a tree trunk, the artists contrast the fast pace of news cycles and modern life with the slow growth of trees, emphasised by the meticulous process required to construct the sculptures.

This work is complemented by Petrified Parallel, which expands the concept into other mediums.

Created as a companion piece to Petrified Times, this work continues to explore how we process and consume information in the modern world. Over the course of the pivotal year 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the artists composed poems using headlines from The New York Times, which they then pasted on paper the same size as the newspaper itself.

In these poems the stark language of current events is transformed into timeless and imaginative prose. For the artists, this everyday poetic process became a way of distilling a flood of negative information into a positive affirmation. The poems encapsulate a rapidly changing world, reflecting both the resilience of the human spirit and the dynamics of subjective experience.

For their installation at Kunsthalle Praha, the artists have created a screen made from 366 newspaper delivery bags onto which a selection of 53 poems is projected. This installation provides a visual archive of the year, turning the daily act of reading into a poetic reflection on time, memory, and the human response to crisis.