| Peter Rockwell | ||||||
 Andrea
called me this morning. She wants me to write about my sculptures
in the church garden for the Website. I don't want to. I think people
should just look at the sculpture. "But," said Andrea, "if
you don't tell them, they will not know that they can sit and climb
on the two monster chairs."  True
- and I hope people know that my sculpture is to be touched as well
as looked at, but I hope that they perceive that from the sculpture
rather than having to be told. A work of art is an act of communication.
If it has to be explained then it has not communicated. My sculpture
is a small peaceable revolt against the domination of words in modern
communication.
My sculptures either have no titles when I am working on them or they have many titles which wander vaguely through my head, changing as the sculpture changes. Often I have no conscious specific idea in my head when I begin. It may be only an impulse to carve away some part of a rough block of stone. Then that change in the block leads to another and another. Eventually I get some sense of what the finished sculpture might be like and try to move it along n that direction. Even when it is finished - which means that it has been moved out of my studio - I am not sure that it is "right" or even finished and I usually have a different title each time I see it. Did God have a clear idea of Leviathan when creating it "for the sport of it?" Or did it as it grew suggest ideas for its own completion?
I am fascinated by the way in which a material such as marble, which is not at all either tree-like or human, can be carved to seem tree-like or people-like without losing its nature as marble. A much better sculptor than me, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, succeeded in making marble look like both a tree and a woman without ever losing its marbleness. Thus he communicated something about the nature of trees, humans and marble, all in the same work. An essential element of the visual arts is that they communicate experiences that cannot be contained in the written word. To me this is why we need art in our churches. It reminds us that our experience of God, our feeling for the infinite, is beyond our ability to describe rationally. My own art is meant to be a reminder that God created Leviathan "for the sport of it." |
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My
sculpture is about stone and trees and people and fantasy. The material
that I work in always participates in the process. A marble tree
is different from a bronze tree in part because my mind reacts to
what my hands tell it about the material as I work. Marble is not
a good material for monsters, it is always suggesting abstract forms,
but limestone and peperino stone are always suggesting new and fantastic
creatures crowding to be seen. Clay for terra-cotta is solid and
round in form while wax modeled for bronze casting is thin and stretching,
suggesting figures trying to fly. I do not know why this is true,
just that it is so for me.