Hub and spoke. Audio Collective.

Happy New Year, everyone. I'm Willow Belden and you're listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

We are hard at work producing our next season, which is set to launch this spring.

Until then, we're bringing you bonus episodes from time to time.

And today is one of those times.

This story is about art, one specific sculpture, to be precise.

And it's about how that sculpture helps us pay attention, how it helps us see the earth around us in a new way.

The story is a guest episode from The Lonely Pallet, a podcast that returns art history to the masses, one object at a time.

Host Tamara Avishai has the story.

Oh, and make sure you stick around at the end of the episode.

I have some exciting news.

So even just to start at our most basic, you know, Panofsky and descriptions of what we're looking at, and I never actually get the chance to do this, so I'm going to take a crack at it. Do it, yeah. So it's a large circle. It has a kind of surface of the moon sense to it,

where it's very organically a relief from the earth of stone that is covered in the reflective surface kind of at the top of the stone like where you would sit like if it's if you could um you know but it's flat and and it looks almost like a stamp that didn't get quite enough ink or that got pushed down on one side more so that you pick it up and it

it yeah it has that kind of semi-relief look to it but it's still very natural looking it doesn't

like even though it's not entirely filled in with the polished surface it's it doesn't look like it's missing anything. It looks like it's just adding

some shade and some volume. I apologize if I say this was a little mistake that I actually love,

was that you called the sides of it stone when they're steel also. Oh, really? Yeah. And what's great

about that, yeah, is that it looks like stone. And, you know, it looks like a ruin from the very moment it went in.

Is this a meteor that hit the earth?

You know, is this something that is from the future or the past, but we really want it to feel like something that's completely integrated.

And I think that idea of it possibly being stone gets to that right that

it's part of the landscape a man just walked by and said that it looked like an amphitheater

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