I was incredibly fortunate to have been commisioned to make an ‘in situ’ sculpture called ‘Night and Day, on a truly magical land right in the middle of a butterfly colony, in Ibague, Tolima, Colombia. The realization of this particular work, within a landscape that encompasses the life cycles of butterflies, inevitably dealt with themes related to the cycles of time, movement, transformation, growth and decay.
Time, here, was represented by the placing of gold leaf, representing day, on the surfaces facing the sun, whilst the less visible surfaces on the bottom, were painted with a particularly intense blue color, representing night.
Movement is made present in this sculpture, by the ondulating organic forms that complement the static squares and rectangles that grow upwards in space, reflecting the nature of change, (Transformation). All of these elements are reflected in the living environment through the function of form,(sculpture). Finally, the qualities of ‘growth and decay’ are made present throughout this wooden sculpture, in what is the inevitable inseperability of life and death, since a fallen tree is a corpse, and the work of the artist is to bring it back to life.
This project is essentially dealing and struggling with issues that have been present in most civilizations throughout our history, issues that have been dealt with repeatedly in sculpture and art. So, it was in the making of this totemic wooden piece, ‘Night and Day’, that I felt I could best approach some of these eternal problems. By striving to arrive to the spiritual by the material, in constructing an ‘axis mondi’, or by building a symbolic ladder that could enable us to connect through an action and go into a gate or passage and through the looking glass, as Alice, whilst being accompanied by the flight of butterflies, into our very own wonderland.