The Aeon

The Aeon emerged from a period in which I repeatedly drew the Aeon tarot card while reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. Together, they prompted me to consider how bodies, systems and eras transform across scales of time that exceed an individual life.

We divide time into hours, years and generations, even though its passage is shaped by motion and gravity, and its meaning by perspective. The painting asks what might change if we looked beyond the scale of our own schedules and lifetimes. What will this age of human-driven planetary change mean eight generations from now? How might we live differently if we understood that the consequences of our actions will outlast us?

At the center of the work, an hourglass filled with swirls and spirals represents a linear, measurable model of time. The movement within it disrupts that order, appearing cyclical, unstable and impossible to contain. Biological shapes evoke life continuing through adaptation across generations, while delicate patterns surrounding the hourglass blur the boundary between the vessel and the space beyond it.

In tarot, the Aeon marks a moment of reckoning, renewal and passage into a new era. The painting draws on that sense of transition, asking what must be released or transformed for another way of living to emerge. The Aeon asks whether looking beyond the limits of an individual lifetime might allow us to see the present not as permanent, but as one moment within a much longer process of transformation.