Buried Gemstone, 2017 is a dormant object. It is an artwork consisting of a single, large gemstone buried in an undisclosed location, its placement known only to the artist. Through this act of concealment the work becomes a kind of uncontrollable encounter: the entire site becomes a contaminated field. Like a contagion, the hidden object infects the landscape.

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Primarily existing in the imaginations of viewers as they walk the sculpture trail it sits within, the work invites them to imagine this latent object – a precious stone – concealed from view yet present in the mind and in the soil of the site alike. There is something quietly radical in this: the artwork refuses to show itself, and in doing so asks whether visibility is a precondition of art at all. The gemstone's value – material, symbolic, geological – accrues in darkness, undisturbed, indifferent to whether it is ever found.

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In one sense, Buried Gemstone operates according to a logic of potential: the object exists most powerfully as an idea, and the idea is most powerful when the object is least accessible. This is not absence but a different kind of presence – subterranean, latent, pressurised. 

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"Buried Gemstone, 2017 can be seen as a counteragent to the physicality of much public sculpture. I hope that it might encourage conversations pertaining to the dominance of vision in the arts, the centrality of ideas buried within objects, the role of the imagination in viewing works of art, how the unseen might be an effervescent presence within everything, and how a work of art might embed itself in the landscape rather than be plonked on it. And although that's a lot of weight for one artwork to carry, perhaps it might also suggest the hidden value the land holds."