The ammonite shell — the fossilized cephalopod found in limestone formations from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods — is the oldest spiral in reach of the hand. Two hundred million years before Vora was made in any human studio, the logarithmic spiral was being executed in calcium carbonate by a creature with no concept of form, no artistic intention, no relationship to the tradition of mark-making that would eventually claim its shape.
This is either humbling or clarifying, depending on the mood. On good days it is clarifying: the spiral is not a human invention. It is a solution that life finds, repeatedly and independently, to the problem of growth within a constraint. The nautilus, the sunflower’s seed arrangement, the hurricane, the galaxy — all of these are the spiral arrived at by processes that have nothing to do with art or symbol or intention. The human hand that returns to the spiral in the studio is participating in something much older than any mark-making tradition. It is recovering a form that was already in the world before the world had anyone to notice it.