Artist Statement: 'In Transformation'
In the Renaissance, bronze is viewed as akin to blood, flowing, glowing red and hot, through the veins and channels of the mould to feed the body of a sculpture. Creatures are born this way – men and madonnas; gods and monsters; nymphs and beasts. It’s alchemy, it’s magick. Imagine how it feels to break a bronze figure free from its mould and hold it, still warm, in your hand.
Wax and bronze, soul and body, blood and bone, presence and absence, the fluid and the solid. Nothing fixed; everything in transformation. The wax figure, so carefully modeled, vanishes, is sacrificed, lost, becomes the ghost of the bronze which takes its place. But bronze itself is an impure, uncertain thing. It too can soften and melt, be recast into forms that are more valuable, more useful, more pleasing, more politically advantageous, more desired.
This endless round of morphing and mutation. Everything, always, in transformation. Allow the eye to travel around and through the scrolling design of a grotesque relief. The comforts of symmetry, the pleasures of ornament are rapidly disrupted by the appearance of nameless monsters. A body floats in space, a twirling flourish of acanthus replacing its head. Flowers have mouths that spout curlicues. Birds have the feet of lions and human faces at the end of incomprehensibly elongated necks. Rosettes open to reveal the withered breasts and hook-nosed faces of crones. What births are these? What perverse, unholy hatchings?
The world is turned upside down. Figures we once saw as grotesque, even comic, assume positions of power. Fools wear crowns and sit enthroned, not just for a day, not just for the carnival, but in real life.
Statues are routinely toppled, defaced, quietly removed or noisily pushed into the docks. A gesture can be grandiose, like that, or soft and small. Imagine shaping a wax figure in the warmth of your human hand. Permanence means more and less than ever before. You ask me: ‘Will it last?’ Will anything last? A bronze emporer may be felled like a tree, a marble general can be smashed to smithereens. What can last? A humble piece of wax endures for 500 years, so we may still read on its surface the traces of Michelangelo’s hand at work. What can last? A forest, a coral reef, an icecap, a mountain? Sculpture confers permanence; that is its job. The most heroic of the arts, it bestows immortality on its makers, patrons, subjects. But here I offer you another view: what changes.
Rebecca Stevenson, 2025