THE BOOK ON MY DESK.

The book on my desk is The Shape of Time, a slim catalogue of Giuseppe Penone’s work. The cover is a quiet grey-green, the kind of colour that looks almost plain until it is next to white paper. It has the useful weight of a book that does not need to announce its seriousness.

“The work is to stay near the things that make you curious.”

I keep returning to a photograph of a hand emerging from a wooden beam. The image is simple enough to remember and odd enough not to resolve. There are pencil marks under sentences about sculpture as an act of revealing what is already present. I do not completely agree with the sentence, which is part of why it is underlined.

You might love this if you like objects that make time visible, photographs of worktables, or the feeling that a material has its own memory. You probably will not love it if you need art writing to explain the art before you have had a chance to look.