This beautiful bas-relief sculpture elaborately carved in brick by renowned Seattle artist Mara Smith symbolically depicts the story of the human quest for knowledge. Smith’s brick carving technique is an ancient art-form more than 3,000 years old first perfected in the friezes of Mesopotamia. The intricate brick mural, made of 1,700 bricks, depicts knowledge systems from life’s early beginnings with images of the solar system, mathematics, mysticism, music, architecture, and literature.

Smith describes her connection to the lost medium, “The clay is the book where I have found my own history…the story of an end of a civilization and the beginning of another…”