Soldered brass, 14 x 14 x 13, 2017.
Created in residence at the Hambidge Center, USA.
A stew is made of whatever is available, cooked until the pieces stop being separate. The sculpture is built the same way, from a bird, a leaf-like dish, a box with a lid, a cut ornamental scroll and a long rod, all gathered in one vessel. The title names a dish that more than one Southern state claims as its own, which fits a thing whose identity depends on what has gone into it.
The bird is the ingredient with the most standing. It perches at the rim with its wings raised and its head bowed over the contents, and its feathers are rendered in fine detail. Game is the traditional meat of the dish, so the bird can be read as what is about to be cooked. Its posture reads differently, as an animal that has found the pot and is looking into it. The sculpture leaves that open, and the bird is both the cook’s subject and a diner.
The vessel sits on short splayed legs, in the manner of a pot set over a fire. The red scalloped edge at the front is the one patch of colour in the piece and reads as heat. The box at the top carries a hammered, oval lid that sits on it unsealed. It looks pushed up and shifted by what is beneath, as a lid is when a pot is full. The rod angled at the right stands in the pot like a spoon left in the stew.
The parts keep their separate identities. The scroll, the leaf form, the box and the bird all stay legible, and none has been cooked down into the others. The sculpture shows the stew at the point before the ingredients lose themselves in it, when everything is in the pot and each piece can still be named.
