Welded painted steel, 23.5 x 23.5 x 10, 2021.
Hesiod measures the depth of Tartarus with a smith’s tool: an anvil dropped from heaven would take nine days to reach the earth and nine more to reach the pit. A pit measured in anvils suits a sculpture built in steel. The toothed ring at the centre is Ixion’s wheel, to which he was bound and set turning for ever. Ovid has Orpheus stop it: when the poet went down with his lyre, the torments paused to listen, and Ixion’s wheel stood still. Inside this ring the looped rods read as a lyre’s strings, and the wheel rests upright on its base, stopped.
The title opens with an idiom. “Shades of” flags a likeness to something already known: a toothed wheel, a sawtooth bar, and a bent spike read as the apparatus of the pit. Shades are also the spirits of the dead, the denizens of the Underworld, and the dark half-disc inside the wheel is a shadow cut from steel. Shades are tints, too: the ring is pale green, the rods red, the wedge a worn gold, and rust, iron’s own shade, comes through wherever the paint has worn. The sawtooth bar and bent spike on the table in front are the instruments of the place, laid down while the music lasts.
