Lapidarian

Heritage Park
FORT WORTH, Texas

Located adjacent to Heritage Park, a great urban park designed by the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and located on the site of the first school in Fort Worth, Lapidarian examines the development of language over the past 35,000 years. A fifty ton granite block is split in two and the interior surfaces are inscribed with written human communication throughout history. The oldest forms of communication are etched into the base of the stone and become increasingly modern as they rise toward the top of the granite blocks. As if the granite block were a newly opened time capsule, one of the granite blocks is right-reading while its opposite is backwards-reading. Ultimately the piece reveals a snapshot of the heritage of all people with the pervading idea that our collective history is a shared one. We are all on the same page.