Giuseppe Penone
A Tree In The Wood
This is no doubt my last post on this blog as I am not allowed to add to it after tomorrow. After delivering my work for Sustaining Your Practice to Barnsley last Tuesday, I continued on to The Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see this exhibition.
I feel the forest breathing and hear the slow, inexorable growth of the wood, I match my breathing to that of the green world around me, I feel the flow of the tree around my hand placed against the trunk. Giuseppe Penone.
Having visited my Lincolnshire wood recently in order to continue my project on Bewildered, I empathise with this statement. At this time of year, with the trees still in full leaf, it was dark and gloomy as I walked into the wood, outside sounds were muffled and it was almost possible to hear the wood breathing.
This exhibition displays five decades of the Italian artist's work and traces his lifelong investigation into the relationship between the human body, sculpture and the natural world. Investigating themes of touch, time, growth and memory Penone's work is made with clay, graphite, marble, bronze and natural material including laurel leaves and acacia thorns.
In the 1960s with no formal art training he began to experiment with natural materials in the forest around his home. Trees have always held a central position in Penone's work. He describes them as "not a subject but much more, they are a substance itself of my work". He often likens trees to the human body: bark to skin, and the flow of sap to blood running through veins. At the centre of the inside exhibition is Matrice, an entire bisected pine tree, with bronze inserts, placed horizontally with it's narrowest ends facing one another.
Outside in the open air are nine other works which resonate with different aspects of this landscape. They range in size from the human scale to towering bronze trees up to sixteen metres high. On driving into the park we are confronted by the gravity-defying Vene di pietra tra i rami, a bronze tree that holds a 20 ton iron-red granite block suspended above the ground.
Like all the works in this exhibition, art coexists with nature, each encouraging us to think more carefully about the other.
I found this exhibition very moving and very much related to my own work, both Shul and Bewildered and current work that I am making in a nearby Lincolnshire Wood. Disappointingly, I just missed the Common Ground exhibition here, but I am familiar with their work and was able to obtain a copy of the exhibition information materials. I am particularly interested in the work on trees and woodlands. Both Penone's work and that of Common Ground have left me buzzing with ideas to continue my own work, celebrating my own locality, a central tenet of Common Ground.
Exhibits in the Underground Gallery.
Patate (1997) Bronze and potatoes
I found this last exhibit resonated with images I had made of the roots of huge beech trees in my local wood.
Outside exhibits
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