RETURN TO RECENT WORKS
interior dialogue, 2023
Details:
Installation of 2 x sculptural works;
CNC Milled Foam Sculpture, Oval Interior (1 of 6 &AP)
Wall-mounted in perspex box with reflective backing
Bronze Cast of Oval Interior (1 of 6 &AP)
Mounted on MDF Plinth
Photos:
Julie Howden
Links:
Culture on Campus Stirling University
Research Process:
Laser Scanning and 3D Renders
DESCRIPTION
Christine Borland’s exhibition Interior Dialogue explores the inspiration she derives from the work of artist Barbara Hepworth, whose sculpture Archaean, 1959, was one of the first sculptures to be added to the University’s Art Collection in 1967.
The two works which make up Interior Dialogue - Oval Interior (Bronze) and Oval Interior (CNC Milling Foam) were created in response to the artists long-held emotional and intellectual engagement with Barbara Hepworth’s work and in particular Oval Sculpture, 1943 in the collection of The Pier Arts Centre in Orkney. They recreate the Hepworth’s hollowed-out interior as a solid form, revealing spaces ‘hidden’ within the sculptures. The series of pierced oval sculptures, made by Hepworth in the mid 1940’s is often described with reference to the land and seascapes of her home on the Cornish coast, while evoking human and post-human themes which echo the physical intimacy of Hepworth’s Hospital Drawings, made in the same period.
Central to the ideas behind Interior Dialogue is to make visible an absence or a presence that without careful and intimate consideration, would go unseen. Barbara Hepworth placed great importance on human connection and the role of internal intuition, once noting ‘I rarely draw what I see - I draw what I feel in my body.’ She frequently asks us to consider the fragility of human life and the way in which it is valued by social systems and institutions, an idea which occupied Hepworth as she made the series of wooden, oval sculptures in the mid-1940s.
Christine’s decision to make Oval Interior (Bronze) in bronze - whose stability is in diametric opposition to the CNC rigid foam of its companion Oval Interior, echoes Hepworth’s move into bronze in the 1950s when she began casting, most often in editions of 6 or 7, including Archaean in Stirling’s Collection which was produced in 1957.
The works are now part of the University permanent collection and were purchased with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions.
Adapted from Culture on Campus Archives.