JONI BRENNER

In 2014 I was invited to participate in the Nirox Winter Sculpture Fair at the Cradle of Humankind. Curators Mary Jane Darroll and Benji Liebmann encouraged me to work on a larger scale than I was used to, and to make sculptures in a more durable medium than the air-dried clay sculptures I had been making.

 

Once I had produced a new group of four small clay skulls, the task was to significantly upscale them and cast them in bronze for outdoor exhibition.  

 

The process involved making 3D scans of the small clay skulls, laser cut steel armatures scaled up five times, and half a ton of clay! 

 

The translation from small to large-scale was not simply mechanical, and the larger versions though based on the smaller, are essentially made afresh. In the limited time available – one week – I managed to upscale only three of the four small originals. These were produced under intense pressure – time was short, and I was out of my comfort zone.  It was a focused and difficult period of work, but one that made me understand how creative breakthroughs are sometimes dependent on this kind of pressure.

 

The scale of the sculptures meant that I worked with giant tools, planks of wood and my elbows and arms to shape and form the sculptures into being. They have an urgency and energy that results from this very physical making process, and a strange quality resulting perhaps from the fact that three of the four skulls are upside down, as if tossed, discarded, or unearthed. Their roundness also lends them a boulder like quality.  

 

A skull – representing a life that once was – is tied to a sense of the inevitable passage of time. Skulls make us acutely aware of those who have come before us, and they foreground the spectre of our own death. They are thus intimations of continuity, and the title of the (eventual) fourth sculpture Kin refers to that sense of lineage and belonging, and to the rootedness that is there in the knowledge of our origins.

 

Once the first three large clay sculptures were completed, expert foundry workers at DSW made moulds from them and cast them in bronze, finishing them with a layered and complex dark patina. They were installed at Nirox on a 5-metre diameter circular gravel base set into the landscape by Iwan Roux at Rekopane Landscapes.

 

The titles given to the three new sculptures reflect the difficulty of the making process. The smallest takes its title from a statement made by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, I sculpt because I am curious to know why I fail; Elbowed references the physical process, and the sense of being affected or impacted by an experience; Heart Head, the title for the largest references its particular shape evoking skull-like qualities as well as the muscly heart organ, bringing home the unsettling fragility of the threshold between life and death.