The artist: 'As the title implies, marble is symbolically associated with the sea. In his book The Riddle of the Image Spike Bucklow refers to marble as ‘petrified waters’. He describes it as pieces of a solidified ancient sea and points out that fossil seashells are often seen within its surface. The image of the moon painted in wax on the marble disc references the influence of the moon on the earth/sea tidal cycle. Molecular biologist Richard Lathe has suggested that without the moon, life may not have developed on our planet. The early moon, which was much closer to the earth than now, generated huge tides that flooded and receded every few hours over miles of the primordial earth creating calm inland pools of high salinity. This tidal flux and the associated changes
in salinity created the environmental conditions and chemistry which enabled the formation of precursor nucleic acids which eventually led to early RNA and DNA and the emergence of life. The theory has been named tidal chain reaction (TCR) and remains speculative.'