Robert A.Hefner III private collection, Aspen, Colorado, USA

EARTHTIME "trapped in the present between the past and the future, EARTHTIME, our fourth dimension, measures our moment of existence" " To the last syllable of recorded time." W. Shakespeare. . . . . . . . .Macbeth. HEIGHT 13FT (4M) STAINLESS STEEL and AZUL MACAUBA 1999

I went to sleep thinking of SPACETIME and awoke with a vision of EARTHTIME.

The Earth exists in a Cosmic second of Being. Each annual trip around the Sun can be likened to a grain of sand in an hourglass. The Earth's life span is being measured, and the number of days is finite.

The image I awoke with seemed to me to capture the Earth's moment of existence. The 4 sided obelisk represents the fourth dimension within which we live, and also the passage of time from the infinitesimal moment of the Universe's birth in the Big Bang, down into the ever widening and infinite Deeptime of the future.

I made a model from plywood with a base of 5 inches (10 cm) and a height of 40 inches (100 cm). For the Earth I used a tennis ball. I was delighted to find, when I came to measure the wooden model, that the centre of the ball, a spot chosen by eye, was exactly on the cut of the Golden Rule !

The edition shown in full above is 13 feet high [4m]. The obelisk is stainless steel. The Earth has a diameter of 16 ins [40 cm]. It is carved from a material called Azul Macauba which comes from South America - this blue granite is chosen to represent the Earth, Mankind's present home, as seen from Space.