Marbled Messages

(on viewing at UddenSkulptur 2014 exhibition at UdenSkulptur Park,Hunnebostrand, Sweden. The international exhibition comprises 24 skulpturs and is located on the coastline in a charming Swedish coastal town that would be worth the visit simply for the beauty of the setting and the town)

 

The colours trickled down the face in frozen solidity. Blues that sang of the summer sea, greens that spoke of autumnal depths within the wandering currents of life's ocean.

At the base of the face a form emerged that was both simplistic and intriguing. Stone which was from the same family as the trickled coloured face had been worked and formed, caressed and chiselled, smoothed and shaped, into pacifying planes of prehistoric matter.

I stood, transfixed by the sculpture positioned as it was with the background of the rock face that strained to touch the blue hued sky upon which played the melody of Thor's symphony. The threatening softness of the blue-black clouds, hovering at the edges of the panorama, added to the mystery of the stone formed creation that had glued my gaze. The contradiction of soft power and hard gentleness, one the product of nature's creativity and the other the result of human ingenuity, danced an enthralling samba with my intellect and emotions.

I could easily have been swallowed by a debate about the existence of some super human entity to whom we should owe a debt of gratitude for the wonder and magnificence of nature. Notwithstanding, my attention was focused more upon the human energies that had wrought from rough stone such a wonderment of workmanship as now not only desired my attention but successfully  commanded my concentration.

The intertwining tenderness of the form stirred primordial instincts of reproduction within my cells, intuitively indicating the rhythms of sexuality which are the interplays of hormones and enzymic releases within the body. Yet, the form was much more than simply a prologue of passion. There was, in fact, nothing recognisably sexual about it. It's sensuousness arose simply from the smoothness of the curves the artist had chosen to endow. Nothing remotely resembled any aspect of a human physical form.  Yet sensuous it was.

Nor was it an intellectual sensuousness that simply seduced reason and logic, for the meandering of the shape, the flow of form, appeared completely understandable. It was so clear in it's logic as to be almost childish in it's behaviour. It had an innocence of explanation that confounded intellect.

Such was this innocence that I began to wonder whether this had been the artist's intent or whether the artist had simply felt the flow of the stone and followed it. In either case, the sculpture started to speak to me of the mysterious mind of the artist whose expertise and knowledge could allow such a form to manifest through their hands.

Thus began my quest, my journey into the grand adventure of discovery and knowingness.