Oval Interior
- Artist:
- Type: Sculpture
- Medium: CNC Milling Foam
- Production Date: 2009
- Description: This artwork, along with Interior Dialogue (see 2023.47), was created in response to Christine Borland‘s long-held emotional and intellectual engagement with Barbara Hepworth‘s work and in particular Oval Sculpture (1943). They recreate the Hepworth‘s hollowed-out interior as a solid form, revealing spaces 'hidden' within the sculpture.
Central to the idea behind Oval Interior and 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 cast the Interior Dialogue in bronze - whose stability is in diametric opposition to this work in CNC rigid foam - echoes Hepworth‘s move into bronze in the 1950s when she began casting, most often in editions of 6 or 7, including Figure (Archaean) in Stirling‘s Art Collection which was originally produced in 1957.
Oval Interior and Interior Dialogue have been deliberately sited alongside Barbara Hepworth‘s work so that the correlation and between the works can be explored and the bodies passing by become an integral part of the dialogue.
To produce Oval Interior, Hepworth‘s Oval Sculpture was laser-scanned. This scanning technology, now superseded by photogrammetry, was developed to scan and preserve fragile museum objects in digital form. The existing Oval Interior was produced by computerised carving using a CNC router ‘ a robotic arm which used the scanned data to ‘carve‘ the sculpture from a block of rigid CNC milling foam, developed for the production of prototypes, macquettes and armatures. The inherent vulnerability of the foam material is an integral part of the work, rather than a physical object its longevity is linked to the intangible, scanned data. - Acquisition Note: An NFA supported purchase
- Digital Copy:A digital copy exists.
- Location: Store
- Accession Number: 2023.48
- Contact: University of Stirling Art Collection
