In 1891, a ceramic plate came into the hands of civil engineer and antiquarian J. E. Hodgkin after it was found in a sewer canal in Southwark, London. Simple in design, it bore a blue inscription reading “you & I are earth,” alongside the date 1661. A ‘memento mori’ from pre-industrial England, the plate spoke to those who encountered it on multiple levels. The neon work reproduces the inscription from the original seventeenth-century ceramic plate, extending its call as it condemns, consoles, and encourages us all at once. It serves as a reminder of our mortality and temporariness - that we come from the soil and will return to it; that we humans are not separate from nature but are part of it, essentially made of the same substance, of earth; and that the two entities, “you” and “I,” are themselves the whole world, that they are everything, and that nothing else matters.