Nika Neelova Russian, b. 1987
23 5/8 x 19 1/4 x 2 in
Ripple Stone - draws its form from a fossilised ripple slab in the Natural History Museum - wave‑formed ridges laid down in a shallow sea, compressed and calcified over deep time - re‑imagined here as a clay bed pressed by the artist’s fingers and left to dry, its overlain thumb‑imprints echoing both the moment of touch and the pockmarked skin of the planet. Filled with tinted silicone and oil that mingle and settle of their own accord, the work evokes the vast, fading networks of thermokarst lakes across northern Siberia: once‑vibrant azure hollows teeming with life, now coalescing into a fragile, warming landscape that bears the collective thumb‑marks of our species. In this interplay of minerality and organic flow, the piece dissolves the artificial boundaries we impose between life and non‑life, reminding us that these separations are human fictions.