Soldered brass, wood, 23 x 9 x 9, 2017.
Created in residence at the Hambidge Center, USA.
The sculpture is a vertical stack: a petalled bowl on a flared stem, an open box, and a base of overlapping leaf forms standing on a round wooden foot. The petalled bowl and the leaf base both belong to the lotus, so the box sits between an opening flower above and a pedestal of petals below. The work stands frontally and vertically and is divided into stages, like a totem. Read that way, the stack becomes a figure: the petalled bowl is a head or crown, the box a torso, the leaf-formed base a skirt or a plinth of drapery. Miró’s late sculptures work on the same principle.
The three stations of the work, bowl, box and base, are joined by a single line of descent, and the sculpture treats sunlight as something that can be collected, conducted and delivered. The petalled bowl at the top is open to the sky and wide enough to receive. Its stem narrows into a funnel that runs down into the box, and the pendant hangs from the end of that funnel. A funnel turns a broad intake into a narrow stream, so whatever the bowl takes in across its width is brought to one point, which is where the pendant hangs.
The pendant has the profile of a light bulb, with a ringed neck where a socket would be. It also has the profile of a drop at the moment before it falls. The two readings depend on each other. A bulb is a made sun, light kept in a vessel and put to domestic use. A drop is liquid gathered at the end of a spout. Hung from a funnel, the form says that light is being poured, and the round hollow in the floor of the box, directly beneath it, is the cup that receives it. The sequence is bowl, funnel, drop, cup, the grammar of pouring applied to the sun.
