Time is the true sculptor here. In these monumental works, gothic figures from New College, Oxford, are rendered not in reverence, but in ruin - their limestone forms so weathered they seem to dissolve before the eye. Faces blur, gestures melt, and what once proclaimed belief now speaks, more quietly, of erosion.
These are not relics to be restored. They are monuments to impermanence. Their damage isn’t decorative, it’s devotional - a slow return to the elements that first gave them shape. In each surface: a history of touch, wind, rain, sunlight. Each crack a record of passing centuries.
There is something painful in their stillness. A kind of grandeur, yes, but one haunted by absence - of context, of meaning, of god. Like Shelley’s Ozymandias, these works ask what remains when power fades, when forms outlast faith, when even stone forgets what it was made to remember.
Mark Alexander and the Prefiguration of the AI Age
Exhibited in “The Galleries Show” at Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002
