Slate Frieze - EU - Brussels

Extract from STILLS FROM SCULPTURE

In the vast new building for the European Union in Brussels I chose an interior site of extreme length, long enough to walk along and not to be seen at a glance. The medium of an engraving is light and the carving unravels as you walk, You might see the frieze in passing or stop in close proximity for a moment's solitary contemplation. There is a notion of continuousness and continuing change and the piece has neither beginning nor end.

Three years earlier at Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall I articulated the gallery space with an arrangement of rectangular slabs of pool-table slate, each panel of equivalent scale to a doorway. Seven of these formedVertical Slates which was leant against one of the walls and a horizontal slate surface was constructed from six slabs sparely supported to hover above the plane of the floor. Horizontal Slate could only be viewed obliquely, in perspective and from all sides. The engraved image was framed in the way that an incident might be caught in the viewfinder of a moving camera or discovered through the lens of a microscope - a moment later and it might have passed by unnoticed. The engraving appears to float on and just beneath the slate surface, drawing in the gaze to the illusory depth of a dark pool. The work recalls the poetic text for my book Shima: Island and Garden which had just been completed and which continues to inform the works that have followed.

The first sketches for Slate Frieze directed the path from one end of the frieze to the other making provision for events along the way. They evolved as a form of notation for the work like a musical score or a map.

Drawings were then made on tracing paper and collaged together to introduce a shallow pictorial depth. A compressed charcoal stick held on its side and the band it left could be controlled by varying the relationship between the two ends of the stick, each end drawing its own line and limited by its connection to the other. The growth of these drawings from this travelling mark were the result of the time and speed with which they were made. The process of making the engraving similarly set its own pace which directly affected the result - an electric grinder was moved almost imperceptibly across the surface, the subtlest alteration in speed or pressure changed the engraving. It was necessary to enter a state of mind not unlike a form of meditation.

The drawing was projected onto the slate as a plan for engraving which introduces physical depth in light and shadow. The angle, depth and line of a cut manipulates the reading of the flat surface, a deeper cut contrarily bringing the apparent surface of the area it describes further forward so that it appears to be at odds with the rest of the slate. If the depth and angle is also varied the plane tips and dips accordingly. Relative areas appear to shift in response to the viewer's own movement. This apparent movement gives the sense that something is happening in real time and turns the photographic record into a series of stills.

© Susanna Heron 1999