Welded steel, 2000.
“Slow Turning” describes what happens to the leftovers of a meal when the washing-up is put off: milk turns, gravy sets, a skin forms. The sculpture is the pile of dishes that waits while this goes on. A wide shallow dish with a knob handle at one end rides on top. Under it a dome sits on a stack of rings and reads as a bowl turned upside down, and a heavy ring lies loose beside it. At the left a boxy ledge stands in for the corner of a sink or a cupboard, and the heap rests on a flat plate that tilts like a draining board.
The sculpture holds a household at one interval, with the meal over and the washing not begun. Everything in the heap has been used and nothing has been put away. The forms are all round and all nested, and each piece sits in or on the next, so the heap is a single mass of overlapping curves with the largest dish lying across the top.
Dark, glossy steel covers every surface. A pile of dishes goes unwashed for a day or two, and the title measures that wait.
