Sculpture

Name Lady Arabella
Material White Marble
Block Marble Quarry Waste
Origin Yatagan, Turkey
Entity Inception Date 2009 March

18 Lady Arabella

I have been on the lookout for some time for a piece of marble big enough for this project. The piece I found was not quite big enough but was adequate for a preliminary sculpture to the one I have in mind for another time.

Lady Arabella is the antithesis of the archetypal female nude sculpture, no pert token gestures here, just a tribute to gravity.

Unlike painting, sculpture as an art form cannot represent color, other than the natural color of material. I can of course represent shape better than any painting allowing the viewer to appreciate the subject in three dimensions.

The color limitations of sculpture therefore make it difficult to differentiate between say a sculpture of say a horse and a zebra.

Lady Arabella has large areolas, so I had to find a subtle way to make them visible. I decided that the best way might be to etch the area of the areolas into the polished surface of the marble. To do this I formed a ring using rolled up double sided sticky tape to form a small pool into which I brushed dilute hydrochloric acid. It took just 2-3 minutes to etch the area sufficiently to make it visible against the background of polished marble.

By chance, the effect was better than I hoped for, the acid not only etched the polished surface but exposed the crystalline structure of the marble creating small areas of reflective crystal. It is not easy to photograph the effect, but it's partially visible on the full size detail [click last picture] below:

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