Although it has been delayed in my consideration of whether or not I wanted to rehearse the installation of my work prior to critiques, I decided to play with composition. I have now made 10 plaster/concrete replicas of my original lithography limestone, I plotted 5 at first, and then all 10 of the stones on the sheer stretcher. I placed them in relation to the fairly obscure yet distinctive lines that I have drawn on my canvas, and centred the stones so the line runs directly through them (A,B,C,C,D).
The tone and language of Richard Serra in discussion with Friedrich Teja Bach is insistent. He discusses living adjacent to the Myoshin-ji temple whilst on his visit to Japan in 1970. “The primary characteristic of both the temples and stone gardens was that the ambulatory paths around and through them were circular… The articulation of discrete elements within the field and the sense of the field as a whole emerged only by constant looking… one is forced to see discrete delineated compartments of space”.
“The gardens demanded a clarity of attention”. Serra makes reference to Brancusi’s table. The work is definite and opens the issues of how one perceives and experiences space, place, time, and movement.
‘Table of Silence’, Constantin Brancusi, 1907
“Sight Point (1972-1975) is about standing in its centre. The centres are spaces. So I am interested in the centring, the positioning of a vertical axis. Your body is defining that centre by where you have to move to understand it. When not only the centring of the place of the work but the centring of yourself in that place becomes the condition of the work – to hold you in a position of being able to perceive the entirety of the structure by locating yourself – you must locate yourself at the core“. Richard Serra Interview by Friedrich Teja Bach, page 32 (Writings, Interviews).
