Citadel

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”

I love the way Jun'ichirō Tanizaki talks about his thoughts on aesthetics in his book In Praise of Shadows (1933).

I initially made Citadel as a study in Belgian Black marble. I love the silky surface, which, when polished not too highly, has a deep and quiet feeling. The form felt beautiful in this stone. When I was thinking about how to enlarge the piece, I wanted to carry over that same dark surface. I was thinking of using Belgian Black marble again or black granite.

I was visiting a stone yard in Carrara and saw a very beautiful piece of Roman Titanium travertine. It has a raw beauty and a feeling of age. The stone is composed of many layers of browns and silvery colors. It is full of natural openings, and if you look inside the larger holes, you can see crystalline structures. The stone was somewhat wild and less uniform and refined than the black stones that I had originally wanted to use.

We were able to source a block of the Roman Titanium travertine large enough to create the full-scale Citadel. It has the same form as the original study, but the sculpture feels quite different in the travertine. In the black stone, it feels quiet and contained; in the travertine, it feels earthier. In this travertine, the sculpture feels as if it could have been unearthed—there’s an ancient-future feeling to it. I love the way it turned out. I left the natural hollows unfilled.

After Citadel was permanently installed outdoors at a private estate in Portola Valley, there was a storm. I imagine that the storm blew some little seeds into the crevices because tiny little plants began to take root in several of the openings. In one, a green stem emerged from a dark, irregular cavity. The voids I had kept as part of the stone became small places where the surrounding landscape could become part of the sculpture.