
The marine past of industrial concrete can be traced back through its inexhaustible demand for calcite deposits in sedimentary limestone. At once prehistoric and proto-industrial, two sculptures comprised of concrete mixing vessels have been stacked into large segmented pillars, invoking tumbling as much as the tumbled. Concrete binds much of the built environment, whereas its loose non-adhering aggregates – sand, silt, gravel, mud, scree – are unstable. They impart a sense of ruin: of abandoned walls and roofless structures, a sense of elsewhen, where time and its material scaffold crumbles and leaks back into the world, returning to the weather. In the mineral realm tumbling through uncertain ground is the condition in which to move through the world – slow, granular and eternally open-ended – a steady shattering of linear time.
For Swedish artist Nina Canell (1979, Sweden) the nature of process is the material of her practice. Grounded as much in the chance encounter as in close study, her work is characterised by a syntax of relations and transfers, whereby material forms and immaterial forces are placed in proximity, facilitating dynamic relations to emerge and sculpture as an agency to take form. The negotiation and displacement of energy has been an integral preoccupation in her work since the very beginning. Thinking beyond the tangibility of sculpture, she sees it not only as something that is grounded in material and objects, but more as a host that might act as a conduit for external events.
For Canell, sculpture is a condition; one that is highly sensitive to spatio-temporal variables. The environment in which her sculptures are placed determines the temperature, atmosphere and transformation of objects – just as they in turn shape what is around them.
Artistnina canellYear2022Materialscement, cardbonated water, crushed shells from marine molluscsSize58 x 53 x 7 cmEditionuniqueGallerycourtesy of mendes wood dm