Levitas – The PLAN Journal, 2021

PART 2 – EXPRESSING MY ART IN ARCHITECTURE

As an architect I search to express art in architecture through form, space and reflectance, revealing its conceptual essence, ethical intent and haptic qualities.
This is my art, and it resists fashion and consumerism.
If philosophy informs the ethics of our age, which exist to help guide our human behavior, art exists to inform and help develop human sensuality – our basic language.
If words are losing their meaning and language has become infested with bullshit, what has happened to the way we are expected to see?
The artist, in expressing life’s forces, becomes a critical voice in society and will be “burned” as often as celebrated for expressing eternal truths and Art’s immortality.
Why paint, sculpt, dance, write, film or compose or extend ourselves into the world?
Can we artists be in a happy place, when we see all around us worlds on fire, floods, starvation leading to migration at the scale of cities?
Art shows us the passage of humanity on Earth.
Art is not in the service of humanity and like nature has no constancy.
Art is a biological act woven into our DNA and is as mutable as nature, made manifest through movement and structure, re-defining us as we create it. Art is a glimpse into the furnace of creation and does not imitate nature.
Art’s biological expression will evolve humanity towards a commonality (community) of sharing and loving each other and the planet.
Art is an unselfish gift to humanity, to the unknown person from the artist exploring the unknown.
Art “plastique” is about movement, as are the performing arts. This is the essence in all Art.
The “lone” artist feels and acts swiftly. No deliberation, no thinking to cloud the action to capture the essence of the moment.
Through art we are made more aware of how others see and feel.
The “team” scientist thinks and acts logically, deliberately, intellectually, to find the answer(s).
Art reveals our humanity, but can it do so without iconography, as science can when revealing our ecology?

CONCEPT

The sculpture at Arte Sella is called “Levitas.” It is a response to the devastation caused by the hurricane that tore through this beautiful alpine valley in October 2018, and by the Italian word for saddle (sella).
My reading of entropy in the context of artworks at Arte Sella was relatively short-term, not measured in days but over a period of a few years – certainly not decades, centuries or millennia. So stone was not of particular interest to me, though a handful of pieces in the park are of stone, one by a colleague and fellow Royal Academician, Peter Randall-Page.
I did not think of trying to resist nature’s effects in terms of durability but was more interested in the manipulation of material which would deliver the sculpture’s form. I did not harbor ideas of permanence – as one might consider a tombstone to be permanent.
It inspired thoughts of renewal and of saddle shaped forms – anticlastic structures – that I had helped design in my time at Arup’s lightweight structures group in the late 1970s. This suggested to me that emptiness would bring a certain ephemeral quality to the work.
Initially I had an idea of floating the saddles – suspended by trees – with the sculpture moving with the wind’s energy transmitted by the movement of the trees. This idea was discarded, however, upon considering the recent destructive actions of the wind, which had demonstrated the potent effect of nature’s entropy upon lightness (levitas) in this region – though much less so upon the massiveness (gravitas) of stone.
So, wood, tensioned into a saddle form (sella), and natural light became the essential materials of the resulting sculpture – “Levitas”.