When I saw Brancusi’s and Zadkine’s sculptures in Paris, executed during the early 1900s, I was so envious of the gigantic pieces of wood these masters had been able to work with, and which liberated their sculptural talents.
Then one day, at the Fanérkompaniet timber merchants in Stockholm, I saw them – THE LOGS!
They were by the entrance; three indoors and one outside. They were for decoration, but so huge that I’d never noticed them before. On several occasions I asked if they were for sale, but this request was always met with salvos of laughter.
They had been there since the 1930s and had virtually become a symbol for the firm.
But I didn’t give up.
One day, when I was visiting in order to buy walnut wood for my sculpture ‘Nefertiti’s Sister’, the managing director of the company was there.
He was in excellent spirits and agreed to let me buy the second largest of the teak logs.
For a long time after we had heaved and hauled it into my studio, I didn’t have the faintest idea about how to set about this enormous piece of wood. It was so beautiful in itself and I didn’t want to fritter it away by carving into it. It would, of course, become smaller as soon as I started to carve.
Even so, I carved a bit here, a bit there – but then I decided to leave it in peace.
Then one day I turned the log upside down and drew a face on it. The cheek happened to be just where I had previously carved out a piece of wood. That’s when the realisation suddenly hit me.
If you carve inwards, the eye automatically reverses the shape it sees. And if you carve inwards in the right way, you need only to remove very little to make a big impact with the result. It’s obvious! That’s why sculptures from Central Africa, North America and Oceania look like they do – their distinctive expression emanates from the reductive process.
If you glue bits on and build up a shape, design adopts a very different idiom.
If, on the other hand, you retain the volume of the material in hand, and let the outer extremities mark, for example, the nose and the lines of the cheeks, then by extending the cheek lines to also form the eyebrows as they meet the root of the nose, you get a heart shape.
If, instead, you let one of the eyebrows follow on freely from the nose, you get a spiral shape. These are the two shapes you can get. No more, no less.
But, nonetheless, endless in variation, stylisation, etc. It’s the same kind of similarity you get between a carriage cushion from Skåne in southern Sweden and a kilim from Afghanistan. Warp and weft define the form – yet no one would ever dream of claiming that Skåne had been influenced by Afghanistan, or vice-versa.
As far as the shape of wood is concerned and the manner in which it communicates with us, we are influenced by the colonial prejudice that wooden sculpture is ‘primitive’.
Since the 11th century or thereabouts, when the all-conquering Christian church manifested itself by building cathedrals in stone, the language of stone and clay has become a metaphor for the victorious faith.
Clay and soft stone, marble and limestone have always lent themselves to a naturalistic form of expression.
By contrast, what Picasso and Braque later translated into painted canvases was an idiom evolved from the language of design of wooden sculpture.”
Draft for catalogue text, 2000 |
