Interview with Helaine Blumenfeld

09/11/16

Interview: Helaine Blumenfeld

Hard Beauty

Hignell Gallery

22 September - 27 November 2016

A professor of philosophy before turning to sculpture as a way to express her dreams and emotions, Helaine Blumenfeld (b1942, New York) has been hailed as the successor to Henry Moore. Her translucent marble works and flowing bronzes take the viewer’s breath away. Blumenfeld was the first woman to be awarded the International Sculpture Prize Pietrasanta e la Versilia nel Mondo in 2007 and was the vice-president of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 2004-09. With an exhibition of her works currently on show at Hignell Gallery in Mayfair, she invited Studio International to visit her at her home and studio in Cambridgeshire.

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Interview with Almuth Tebbenhoff

15/06/16

Interview: Almuth Tebbenhoff

Born in Fürstenau, in north-west Germany, Almuth Tebbenhoff (b1949), the daughter of a hobby blacksmith with his own welding machine, moved to England at the age of 18 , where she studied ceramics at the Sir John Cass School of Art. Since 2003, she has been a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. In 2006, while on a residency in Pietrasanta, Italy, Tebbenhoff began to work with marble, and, since then, her practice has spanned a variety of materials, always coming back, however, to the same central theme of the cosmos and its overwhelming vastness – an idea she was introduced to by her father when she was a child.

In the run up to a joint exhibition at Lacey Contemporary, London, Tebbenhoff spoke to Studio International about this universal thematic and some of her means of interrogating it.

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Interview with Virgile Ittah

22/01/16

Interview: Virgile Ittah

Once you have seen the work of the London-based French artist Virgile Ittah (b1981, Paris), it is not something you will easily forget. Her life-size, haunting wax bodies, seemingly melting or decomposing as they lay collapsed across their metal bed frames or chairs, seek not to be sculptures, but to be human beings. Their transparency gives them an eerie, uncanny quality, and yet, in their abjection lies a beauty, perhaps a result of their inherent contradictions: fragility versus solidity, warmth versus coldness, life versus death.

Currently one of the 14 women artists in the Saatchi Gallery’s first all-women exhibition, Champagne Life, Ittah spoke to Studio International about her technique, her current collaboration with her partner, Kai Yoda, and her thoughts on the status of female artists today.

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Interview with Alice Cunningham at the Royal British Society of Sculptors

21/11/15

Interview: Alice Cunningham

Alice Cunningham: Brian Mercer 2014 Stone Carving Residency Exhibition

Royal British Society of Sculptors
22 October – 18 December 2015

Alice Cunningham (b1983) was the winner of the 2014 Brian Mercer Stone Carving Residency, awarded by the Royal British Society of Sculptors and the Brian Mercer Charitable Trust. Having very limited experience with marble, her three months spent at Studio Sem, in Pietrasanta, Italy, were an invaluable – and rapid – learning opportunity. During her time there, Cunningham was able to engage with, and learn from, both local artisans and international artists, as well as to collaborate with a robot.

As the quarry from which Michelangelo sourced his marble (he believed it to be superior in quality to the nearby Carrara) Pietrasanta has an imposing history. Sem Ghelardini, who founded the studio in the 1950s, was famous for his openness to younger artists and can be thanked for giving Henry Moore his first block of stone to work with. Cunningham, whose work embraces both conceptual art and more traditional, formal sculpture, was a perfect candidate to spend time at the studio and continue its tradition.

Cunningham’s initial introduction to stone carving came during a two-week residential workshop as part of her degree at the University of Brighton (2003-6), when she worked in the Portland stone quarries in Dorset. In 2007, she had her first brief encounter with marble, when she spent a month in Zambia. The four pieces she made during her time in Pietrasanta, which, together with photographs and film footage, constitute her exhibition at the Royal British Society of Sculptors, are therefore ambitious and impressive.

Conception, a wave-like form crashes down – fragile yet full of power and solidity – while a large boulder, Dialogue, cut into to create various shelves, contrasts the natural markings of the rock with Cunningham’s human interventions. Unravel was made from a piece of marble Cunningham chose from the river – the place sculptors often go when they cannot afford to use the quarry. Finally, Perspective, which stands tall like a totem, revealing faces and expressions that seem to alter the more you look at them, is actually a representation of the quarry on one side, and the nearby mountains on the other. The work was created from a 2D photograph, which was fed into a computer and rendered into a 3D model, which was then first carved by a robotic hand, before being finished by Cunningham. An interesting collaboration, reflecting the interface of nature and artifice, or the organic and the manmade or man-altered.

Watch this interview here