Welded steel, 60 x 84 x 72, 2001.
A child building a fort takes what’s at hand and gives each thing a job. A bowl becomes a turret, a ball becomes a foundation, a plate becomes a drawbridge, and each object stays recognizable under its new role. Spanish Castle is built that way. The title borrows the English phrase for a daydream, a castle in Spain, and the sculpture builds one out of ordinary things.
The tower is the stronghold. It’s a tall slab-sided block with a column of round openings in its wall, like portholes or arrow slits, and a domed top with a wide brim that reads as a helmet. A long curved plate reaches out from the top of the tower to the far end, where a stack of bowls tilts on a sphere. The plate reads as a ramp or drawbridge, and the bowls are the outer works it leads to. The castle’s equipment is all present: windows, a roof, a bridge and battlements, each supplied by an object that was made for something else.
The tower stands planted on a broad base. The bowls tilt at angles that look ready to shift, and the far end of the sculpture balances parts that were never made to be stacked. It looks like a game in progress, with the next move still open.
