A New Work
Late Sculpture, Agatha Gothe-Snape, The Commercial 2013
My daughter Agatha Gothe-Snape enlisted me to fabricate a sculpture to her specifications for her current show at The Commercial, in Redfern.
Making sculpture can be tedious and physically demanding. To make a work that was not my own extended me, but I have learnt much from the experience.
Ultimately it felt like this is a work I might have made myself had I been blessed with a capacity for restraint, conceptual rigor and freshness. Through her direction, in making a work that was conceived by her, ironically it felt like I was more able to be myself. My genes were making a better account of themselves through her!
The work is quite sparse. It might be identified as an account of nothing at all. It is in a way, the most we can expect of a blank canvas. It is the potential of starting, without the mud of our projections cast on it.
It is the beginning of sculpture. It is the Archaic Greek Kouros sculpture taking its first ginger step into three dimensions, rendered planar.
It is the simplest way one sheet of paper can be folded so that it can free stand without additional support. Painted white the sculpture reflects its paper origins. Rendered large and heavy accentuates these features, robbing the viewer of any capacity for confusion.
This sculpture exemplifies the way in which The Sydney School of Sculpture can be manifest. Just when we imagine we may know how The Sydney School of Sculpture might be identified and understood, another side of it is revealed.
Over the coming posts here, we shall scrape away the layers that obscure a more precise understanding of what The Sydney School of Sculpture is.
Agatha replacing shackle
Installed in Woollahra