During a conversation with the theologian Tom Ravetz yesterday evening, he described what I was doing as drawing in three dimensions. This statement struck me because of its perception and aptness to describe what I do or rather not do when working. Generally a sculptor draws out his ideas before working. At least I have always had a sense that this is what I should be doing. However, whenever I have sat down with pencil and paper in hand and drawn out an idea, I have had a strong feeling that I am going through the motions of process and that the real drawing starts with the sculpture material itself.
Drawing in its simplest form is normally taken as the trace of the eye or some other algorithmic process translated into visible marks experienced through sight. This assertion leads me to ask the question, what if drawing were to be done so as to be perceived through another sense? This is a perfectly reasonable thesis to posit. In my case that sense would be or is, touch but there is no reason why some other sense could not be invoked; we do best what we are most inclined to do without too much thought; shape and touch are a principle way in which I enjoy the world and appreciate its beauty and symmetry.
A man ought not to work for any why…but only for that which is his being, his very life within him. Meister Eckhart
If drawing is a means of tracing, mapping and representing an aspect of the world we see and worlds we can only imagine, then I am translating inro a tactile language a world where form and function, essence and end are simultaneously consistent, one and the same thing. That world of biology, contains the theme of my work but it is not the subject. By making the distinction I prepare myself to avoid description, illustration or comment. The broken symmetry between biology and art I liken to the boundary that we as humans have constantly redrawn between ourselves and the rest of nature. An elastic lamina forged by people over time arising out of our need to deal with the large questions that emerge as a function of our capacity to perceive existence.
Bibliography
Arber, A. (1954). The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form. Cambridge.
Pfeiffer, F. (1924, 2nd impr. 1949), J. Eckhart’s Serm. LXV, p. 163.
Organisation. I have a deep fascination, indeed need for organisation. We perceive the universe as organised, whether we think holistically or in a dialectic way. I do not mean in a teleologically sense but as a spontaneous falling into place, an inherent ordering of things, as opposed to a state of homogenous and uniform chaos. I am giving a personal aesthetic to the concept of organisation fed by many ideas and fields of interest. My work is specifically about giving organisation an aesthetic rather than seeing it as a process to somewhere or something. I set rules from which an aesthetic statement arises that embodies a view of unity between disparate fields of knowledge.
How does your photographic work relate to recent sculptures?
In both mediums I use the respective technique to reveal elements of time and form. With the pinhole photography the very long exposures accumulate successive images of the subject to form a single representation over a period of time. Detail becomes form loosing its particularity of information in return for density of meaning. With the sculptures detail punctuates the form like each second of a day.
To say that light forms the image in both cases is to almost state the obvious. Painting and photography on the other hand creates its own internal light. What separates a photograph from a sculpture is that the former cannot exist without light whereas a sculpture is pure form and does not disappear in the dark. Object sculpture and much else deals with texture and volume, qualities that are independent of our ability to see them. A photograph only creates the illusion of texture just as a painting creates the illusion of depth. Fontana literally broke through this illusion and Stella played up to its constraints.
There is also another dimension which is purely conceptual. This is clearly demonstrated in the juxtaposition of one of my recent protogenetor forms and the pinhole photographs of Michelangelo’s prisoners I took in 2003 at the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Buonarotti drew out platonic forms of Man locked in the struggle to emerge into existence. This evolution of a distant ideal is in the realms of my current work which delves into a distant past idealized into a neo-platonic visualisation by force of the separation of time and imagination. Both the Prisoners and my work are evolutionary, both emerge out of cosmological ideas and a quest for origins, both deal directly with form. I appropriated the images which are now collectively owned by all humanity in my own way. Constructing a camera and reducing the images to a minimum to describe a sense of emergence.
Michelangelo removed material from the surrounding figures, as he said, trapped inside the stone. This I recorded using light and translated the images as a density of negative space defining the luminous content. My models directly displace space through an additive process rather than a subtractive one. Whereas in one set of works I look at the process of uncovering form with light (or rather the subtraction of light which is then reversed when printing the negative), in the other build out a vision through a direct sense of space by means of touch in which light plays an important but arbitrary and ever changing role.
Glazing has a primarily practical function with decorative potential, it speaks of ceramics. I am not concerned with decorating the works, neither do they have a specific function like that of carrying water. I do not glaze because I want to show that the work is conceived as a sculpture. The porous surface increases the sense of fragility and the sculpture breathes like a living being. By not colouring I leave visible the mineral nature of the material and draw links with archeologically. Painted surfaces rarely survive the passage of time and much of my work touches on the theme of time in one way or another.
In conversation with Carla Lonzi in 1967 Pino Pascali said,
Primitive man, the man who walks naked, notices that the sun rises to the right of a particular mountain and sets to the left of a particular tree. The same man, walking through the forest, discovers that the sun also rises behind another mountain. When that man needs to drink he creates a shape with his own hands. When he makes that gesture with his hands he uses his whole energy. He creates a civilization, a world all of his own. It’s not a work for a work’s sake; what is important is the intensity which is brought to bear on its realization.
An artist makes use of what they have at hand. Clay is simple and direct yet it sets challenges that give the work direction. It allows me to juggle the pre-visualisation of ideas before beginning a piece with the spontaneous generation of forms, patterns and significances whilst work progresses. I use clay as a malleable stone. Carving on this scale with stone would be impossible. Modelling is my first instinct.
At the moment I am considering other materials and methods. However, it is important that the medium not only responds to my ideas but also possesses a provenance, cultural and poetic which resonates with the work’s content. The plastic quality of clay is a property of its mineral constituents. However, clay is also closely associated with organic material. When fired, all the that is burnt away and a hard mineral stone remains. This process of physical and chemical change is a literal analogy of the mineralisation and transformation of organic material into fossil remains.
Once fired, clay is extremely durable but equally brittle and fragile. A piece becomes a hostage to fortune, its survival contingent on the vagueries of the world, lying within this duality of permanence and the ephemeral. It is of almost universal abundance and its humble origin fascinates me; the way in which such a material can be transformed into the most exquisite object. Ceramic artifacts are associated with all but a very few cultures from very ancient times to today. They are often one of the few pieces of surviving evidence of human activity. Civilisations and societies are often classified according to the pottery they leave behind. Clay lies on a continuum of human existence, it transcends the everyday and accompanies the human journey frough time, even in today’s technologically rich society.
How does your photographic work relate to recent sculptures?