Wall Of Wind
White Carrara Marble, 2012
Exhibition INTERESTING TIMES, University of Leicester, Annual sculpture show 2012
HAROLD MARTIN BOTANIC GARDEN
It is always exciting at outdoor sculpture exhibitions to come across one or two works that have been hewn from the mountain and worked with human hands into startling new forms. Few things are more visually rewarding than seeing a recalcitrant material like marble yield to the scultptor's creative energy. This year, Wall of Wind is an example of that process. An imposing slab of Carrara marble has been carved with diagonal bands of cross-woven ribons to form lattice-work screen, each intersection pierced to form and irregular aperture. Artist worked the Wall of Wind in Tuscan town of Pietrasanta where artists have been carving marble sicne the Renaissance, collaborating with local artisan craftsmen to bring stone from the surrounding quarries before transforming it in the studio. There was used a range of drilling and carving techniques to give the stone a pillowy softness that belies its true weight and mass. It recalls the elaborate screens made for Italian churchesof the Byzantine Empire that used interlaced strapwork and other forms of decorative abstraction.
The unfinished edges of the slab create a sense of it being a fragment from a much larger panel, although how large is left ot our imagination.
