BOOK OF HOURS

A secular book of hours, this work represents each hour of the day and night with an image, depicting erosion patterns on coastal rocks to symbolize the passage of time. The intention is to draw its reader into a calm, inward-looking space, in which to practice mindful seclusion—if only for a while.

The title plays on the famous Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, but unlike the deeply religious focus of the medieval manuscript, this book draws on the natural world for inspiration. Rather than a guide to prayer, it is more like an illustrated clock that invites the reader to slow down, and contemplate a series of flowing, organic shapes.

These rocks may change very slowly as they are sculpted by the ocean over millennia, but they will surely outlast us onlookers—waves will still rush over them long after we have gone. We struggle to make this world fit for our grandchildren to occupy; who will follow them, no one knows. Only the mindless violence of the water will continue, as the rising seas slowly push their way inland, to new beaches.

Time itself is too vast to comprehend, but we can appreciate its heralds, the tides. Similarly, there is an ebb and flow to the sequence of images, with elements from one carrying over into another.

Shapes and textures slip from one frame into the next, and like water, light and dark flow in and out of each composition. Drawn by the sun’s passage across the sky, they echo the book’s central motif. Yet there is also a sense of movement and continuity between the frames, reminiscent of a melody playing variations on a theme.

At the same time, each double-page spread functions as a diptych, with each image playing off the other, offering both contrasts and similarities. The twelfth photograph marks the midpoint of the series, and acts as a caesura, setting the scene for the second set of images.

The photographs depict subjects only in part—we never see the whole shore, only abstract details. Even a tiny tide pool only hints at the large reef in which it sits. We see the pockmarked rock around the water; that is all we need to know.

All images were taken during a single morning on the namesake beach in California, with the purpose of illustrating a book of hours firmly in mind. They therefore offer unity of time and space, combined with a shared subject matter: Time made manifest through erosion.