Anam Cara

AN OBJECT LOVES SPACE. WITHOUT SPACE, THE SHAPE, COLOUR and presence of the object remain unseen. Most of the objects in the world lie buried under earth or under water. As a child I remember being fascinated by this as I watched my uncle and father clearing land. In levelling a field, the ground would be opened, the tightly packed layers of caked earth broken and freed; then sometimes an inner mound would reveal where a huge rock lived inside the earth. They’d dig around it, and then with crowbars they’d hoist the stone up out of its lair. For days and even weeks afterwards, the stone looked dazed and estranged, standing unsheltered and alone in the severance of wind and light, a new neighbour in the world of eyes, weather and emptiness. Some stones seemed to take ages before they began to look comfortably at home in the outside world. As they slowly took on the accretions of weather and its erosive engravings, time enabled them to forget the underworld. In a sense this is the disturbance, the revelation and strange beauty that a new piece of sculpture causes in the world.

Sculpture arrives; it makes an entry, draws attention to itself and invites the eye to take it into account and rearrange its inner world accordingly. Sculpture is different from all other art. Whether it is stone, metal, clay, wood or external assemblage, it is a sensuous concrete thing, another object in the world – to be seen, touched and placed. Usually a piece of sculpture inhabits stillness, yet the stillness is not dead or vacant. It is a stillness that is shaped with presence. In a way, a piece of sculpture is a still dance. Recently I gazed at a majestic piece by Barbara Hepworth. Its pleasing green shape had a simple aperture near the top; the whole dignity of its restrained elegance reminded the heart of some vital form, perhaps something lost or something dreamed that is still to come. Sculpture can have this poignancy when the shape and stillness of the silent thing stirs something in the heart that thought could never dredge up.

The arrival of a piece of sculpture changes the space. Though we dwell all the time in space, we are often blind to the wonder of its emptiness and how it allows each thing to be there. When the sculptor is working on a piece of stone, she might be releasing the hidden shape within it, as Michelangelo believed. What she certainly is doing, however, is altering the conversation between space and matter. As the word voices silence, so shape states stillness. Space gathers itself differently around the piece of sculpture. Our eyes are drawn to the piece, but they also register how it charges space with the emotion of its presence. Sculpture sculpts space, that silent and still continuum that allows us to be and in every moment bestows upon us the privilege of whereness. Space is faithful to us in a primal way; it offers the ‘where’ that permits us to be here. It does not have crevices that we could fall through to disappear into nowhere. A piece of sculpture can render space visible and vocal. It frees the eye and the heart to glimpse the embrace of the invisible.

Sculpture also suggests and sometimes unveils the mystery that resides inside what we blandly call ‘matter’. Humans are so easily contented, addicts of the familiar, willing to remain satisfied with outside description. Yet all around us so-called ‘matter’ is brimming with secrets in its inner dance of alteration. In a beautiful sculpture called The Stone Within, the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi brings out the colours, textures and inner light of the basalt rock. Noguchi said of this piece: ‘To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity – not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.’ The inner secrets of stone cannot be pre-empted. Everything depends on that precarious moment, where and how the sculptor starts. Perhaps in no other art does the moment of beginning hold the future so definitively. Noguchi puts it this way: ‘In working stone, the primary gesture, the original discovery, the first revelation, can never be repeated or imitated. It is the stroke that breaks and is immutable. No copy or reproduction can compare.’

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