Blankness is a beginning and an ending, an invitation and a closed door, an empty slab pregnant with possibility and a stony gaze. [...] The sculptures come into being through the gouging of a precise vertical notch in basalt rimrocks purposefully sourced from the very edge of cliffs where they are precipitously perched ever exposed to air, ever becoming dust. The rock fragments extracted from the notch are pulverized, transformed into pigment, and applied onto a piece of Belgian linen emerging from the notch—an intentional artifice that is at once an elemental gesture and a sophisticated mark of culture. The negative space of the notch poignantly casts a positive shadow emanating outward as painting. Paradoxically, iconic “nature” is, through the artist’s iconoclastic operations, converted into an object for aesthetic devotion and consumption. ... Aptly, Aldo Leopold’s aha moment of realizing the need to “think like a mountain” occurs at the edge of rimrock, the very stone used in the sculptures. [...] The slot in each rimrock sculpture is also a nod to the quarrying of rock. [...] The act of creation is not unrelated to the act of quarrying stone, of extracting from the materially rich tabula rasa, of drawing grace from inner resources. We must think ecologically with the body.
Photo: Brica Wilcox (sculptures), Andy Keate (install)
