The Edgar connection

In these respects, John Edgar’s contribution to our thought about ourselves and his relation to those uncertain futures is best expressed through the lustrous objects themselves and their calm dignity. As stone subsequently marked by human intention, these objects at once carry meaning into a process of time quite unlike that natural to the human body, and remind us how recent in geological terms the advent of humanity is. As signifying objects, linking matter and mind, they point beyond nature to that most distinctively human of realms, the resource of recorded knowledge and human experience. Like the fossil shells the design of which Miller wondered at and saw repeated in human arts, John Edgar’s signifying stones speak to us of the creative intersection between matter and mind, and the opening out on to humane meaning mediated by his works emphasises the ongoing, collective activity of cultural re-visioning and the myriad indeterminate pathways between minds along which meaning travels and is constantly renewed.