In Autumn 2014, sculptor and mixed media artist Alice Cunningham spent three months in Pietrasanta, Italy where, as a recipient of the Royal British Society of Sculptors Brian Mercer Stone Carving Residency, she worked with artisans at Studio Sem to create a series of marble sculptures inspired by the physical qualities of the material and the processes involved in its extraction from the famous quarries nearby.
The resulting works are included in her first solo exhibition, currently on show at London headquarters of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. Exploring form and line, the four marble sculptures represent a shift from ‘impermanence to permanence’ that the artist has sought to develop in her practice over the last two years.
Cunningham’s introduction to stone carving came during a two-week residential workshop as part of her first degree at University of Brighton (2003-2006) when she worked in the Portland stone quarries in Dorset. But it wasn’t until 2007, when she spent a month at Rockstone Studios in Zambia, that she encountered practitioners working in marble and developed a desire to explore the material further.
Works from around that time, such as Sustenance (2007), humorously contrasted earth and concrete to create a visual metaphor around manmade versus nature. This theme of opposing forces continues in her recent series in bronze, Monuments to change (2015), which seeks to break down the dichotomy between transience and immutability by capturing traces of tidal water in direct castings of a sandy beach in Wales.
Earlier this year, Cunningham relocated from London to Bristol – via a masters degree at Coleg Sir Gar in Wales – a geographic transition that has been seismic for her artistic practice, allowing better access to the space, facilities and support required for making large-scale, permanent sculptural pieces.
Your practice has involved a range of media over the years, originally sited in sculpture it has also included performance and video. But you began working on larger stone pieces relatively recently, what were the influences for these new works?
In a way it’s necessity of what I had access to because, of course, I was based in London for almost eight years and I had limited studio space and limited access to workshop facilities. It was a kind of practicality that led me to work a lot with materials that weren’t permanent. But, especially in the last few years, I wanted to make something out of a material that would last a lot longer.
It’s from a practical sense, on the one hand – but also maturing as an artist and wanting to condense these ideas of form and line. I became increasingly interested in the condensing and articulation of the things that I’d been exploring in many different media before. Stone is a really interesting way to do that because it takes so long to articulate anything that you have to be quite convinced about it.
Can you tell me about the process of working in Italy and how it has shaped your work or taken you in new directions?
I went there with a completely open mind, wanting to create something site-responsive and material responsive rather than impart a premeditated shape or form into the stone. When I got there I undertook a pretty rigorous exploration of the mountains and the quarries. I was working with a very established studio in a place that is founded on sculpture – it’s the quarry that Michaelangelo opened up, right next door to the city of Carrara, which is the biggest exporter of marble. Pietrasanta was Michaelangelo’s preferred site for extracting marble. It’s had such a long legacy of working stone that I was able to really benefit from people’s expertise there.
Going up to different quarries with the studio director was absolutely incredible. I got to see the process of extracting stone from the mountains and the horrific beauty of that site. It is absolutely immense to be carving up the mountains and that really inspired me. A lot of my works deal with the meeting of the constructed and the natural, the manmade and natural materials; the geometry versus the natural shape of the landscape was incredible. The process of working in stone makes you condense and articulate a lot more because it’s so slow. Those are the biggest impacts on this new body of work.
What was it like working with the artisans in Pietrasanta?
It was amazing, they just know their stuff. They really, really know their stuff! They know a million ways to get to a practical solution to achieving what you want to with the stone. They just work really quickly and intuitively with different kinds of marble. Sem Ghelardini, who founded the studio was famous for his openness to younger artists. He gave Henry Moore his first block of stone to work with and gifted many young artists stone so that they could try it out with the hope that they might take to the material and come back and use the workshop.
Marble has a fascinating history – it has changed from being a material predominantly used for religious statues to one that was more recently utilised by abstract artists who work more freely. Studio Sem was one of those ground breaking studios that supported artists to work in that way. It also has a reputation of supporting young artists and is very generous in the way its artisans support and work with people when they are learning how to use stone or want to experiment. It’s very much the mentality of supporting, experimenting and learning from each other.
And could you say a bit about the works which will be in the exhibition?
The biggest piece, Dialogue (2015), which is outside the gallery, is a boulder that I selected from one of the quarries. I selected this one after spending the day up there and then it was shipped down to a workshop. I tried to be sensitive to the form of the stone because there is such a legacy in that area of incredible artistry working with this material. The material itself is very beautiful even before you do anything to it. I wanted to make considerate marks and cuts, which take into consideration its already existing surface and form. I very much tried to collaborate with what was already there within the stone.
Two other pieces, Unravel (2015) and Conception (2015), are workings of the internal surface versus the external surface. With marble, the external texture is completely at odds with the cut line of the finished, polished surface. You can make some really beautiful contrasts between the two.
How has the residency taken your practice in new directions?
Perspective (2015), the final piece was inspired by a series of skyline paintings that I did before I went of urban and rural skylines silhouetted in black , which are put together to make them look as if they’re a reflection, one of the other. When I was in Italy I [painted] the cut quarry skyline versus the uncut quarry skyline. We fed that onto the computer programme and gave it a depth. That was fed to a robotic arm and the robotic arm, which had a grinder attached to it, cut out that form from a piece of marble. It came back to me in the studio and I finished it off by hand. [Stone sculpture studios] are increasingly using robots with computer-aided design and 3D printers. How technology is entering into this process is really interesting.
The Brian Mercer 2014 Stone Carving Residency exhibition is at the Royal British Society of Sculptors until 18 December 2015
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