Soldered brass, iron, 12 x 9 x 8, 2018.
Created in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
A fountain is water given a shape, and this one has no water in it. Every element that would carry the flow is metal: the leaf that hangs in a falling line, the curved rod that arcs out and ends in a drop, and the vessel tipped at the angle of pouring. The sculpture draws a fountain with the water left out, and the question is what the form still does without it.
The vessel is the centre. It is tilted on its side with its rim raised, in the attitude of something emptying, but its wall is pierced with rows of holes. It cannot hold water at all. It can only pass it through. Whatever is poured here is already gone, so the pouring is permanent and nothing is ever contained. The leaf pendant hangs from the arm above and runs down against the vessel’s mouth where a stream would enter, and the ring handle at its side suggests the vessel could be lifted and carried. The jet is rendered as foliage, a stream the fountain tradition has always dressed in leaves and scrolls.
The curved rod at the left traces the parabola of a jet and terminates in a single teardrop. It is the one place the water is drawn as water: a drop at the moment before it falls, held at the end of its arc. Against it the leaf hangs straight down in a cascade. The two describe the two kinds of fountain motion, the thrown arc and the free fall, and neither moves.
The base reads as the lower basins of a tiered fountain, stepped discs and a domed, ribbed form, with the vessel as the upper tier pouring into them. Water would run down from the pierced vessel over the stepped rims, and the sculpture arranges the whole descent while leaving it dry. The upright plate behind the vessel, with its scrolled edge, stands like the back wall of a wall fountain, the surface a spout is mounted against.
