Karen Miranda Abel

 Flowstone is a contemplation of light and timelessness in elemental chiaroscuro. The sensuous minimalist form was created to cultivate sunlight and shadow on stone, reflecting on the deep time interrelationships intrinsic to the marble—the essence of its past, present, and future.

The marble was hand carved and shaped with circling movements, slowly arriving at an elemental form that embodies something of the primordial matter of the marble itself; a trace of the stone’s origins from across the mists of geologic time, some 300 million years ago (1). Illumination surfaces through circulating veins of minerals such as mica, pyrite, and iron oxides. Soft ovoid curves recall the bodies of prehistoric marine animals of an ancient sea—the calcareous shells of molluscs, coral, and crustaceans—transformed by metamorphism into a dense mass of sparkling calcite crystals, ultimately becoming marmo (marble).

The slow tide of the sun’s light approaches the elliptical form, releasing a chromatic wave of shadow like the dark side of a celestial body. Light and shadow find movement in symbiosis. From the revelation of the sun’s rays, the penumbral shadows that arch into the cool surface, and the elliptical umbra, phases of chiaroscuro translate light into a cosmic landscape, composing a dynamic light memory on stone like some otherworldly sundial. Ultimately, Flowstone is an energetic sculpture “carved” by light each day—flowing and transforming with the cycles of time, recalling the primordial origins of the marble itself.

First illustrated in Galileo’s 17th century sepia watercolour drawings of the moon (2), the crepuscular phase of light between the terminator line of day and night on the moon is also known as the twilight zone. In speleology, the same term describes the point of passage where one leaves daylight and enters the liminal space of delicate light at the mouth of a cave. In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Mcfarlane recounts such a sensorial duality upon visiting a cave system: “I have, again, a powerful sense of this landscape as one in which geology both produces and confirms ways of feeling. Here in this hollow terrain…historical memory behaves like flowing water...Here in this topography of cavities and clandestine places, dark pasts get hidden, then brought to the light again” (3). Moving within the intimacy of sun and shadow elicits a sense of timelessness, as if crossing thresholds suspended in time across physical and psychological geographies, arriving at a sensation of cyclical flow within light and dark, past and future.

Flowstone is part of project titled Elements for a Light Garden. It was hand carved in Tuscany from an old, remnant block of statuario (statuary) marble from Carrara—its surface marked with an aged patina and several fractures. The seasoned stone was one of the last pieces from a long-ago abandoned quarry, sourced from one of the oldest family owned stone merchants in Pietrasanta.