‘I the sculptor am the landscape’ - Barbara Hepworth’s Roots of Stone - The London Magazine

You can feel this connection between contemplation and action, reflection and transformation, in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

If language frames your understanding of the world, those who live on the land, have a different understanding than those who live in the memories of emperors. There’s no empire in creator’s time.

This was life. Could art, should art, be isolated from life? I began to feel more and more strongly that art must be life—it must belong to everybody. I felt, more powerfully than ever, that what I had created had a purpose.

Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges—beyond spatial and temporal prisons—a personal vision.

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Piranesi lived among statues: silent presences that brought him comfort and enlightenment. I thought that in this new (old) world the statues would be irrelevant. I did not imagine that they would continue to help me. But I was wrong. When faced with a person or situation I do not understand, my first impulse is still to look for a statue that will