materiality, marble and a sense of place
Pop quiz:
1. What’s this?
2. What’s it made from?
3. Where does this material come from?
While the answer to question 1 is a no-brainer, and 2 slightly shaky, 3 might comes as a bit of a surprise; the limestone columns whose colour are key to the White House’s name are not all-American but were outsourced, from the Croatian island of Brac renowed for the purity of its local stone.
Brac stone quarry, courtesy of Corbis
Stone is one of those materials most endowed with a sense of place. Each variation in colour, veining and density is the result of entirely local geological conditions. I like to think of this ‘sense of place’ as a craft quality - so strong is this when it comes to marble that the name of the location is often a part of the stone’s name - from Carrara white to Belgian black.
I got to thinking about this quality of place that some materials are both endowed with, and endow upon, the objects and buildings they are used for during a recent encounter with Martin Creed’s latest work, commissioned by Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery.
Martin Creed, Work No. 1059, 2011. Image from artdesigncafe
The Gallery commissioned Work No. 1059 as part of an exhibition it dedicated to the Turner Prize winning artist last year and installed in time for this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. In essence, the work is a refurbishment of The Scotsman Steps, a winding, and until recently fairly forlorn, staircase built in 1899 as part of the Scotsman newspaper’s building.
photograph by Gautier Deblonde.
Creed’s intervention is no Changing Rooms-style MDF makeover, but a feast of sumptuous marble - or rather, marbles. Each of the 104 steps is clad in a different marble, creating a spectrum of material samplers. As such, Work 1059 continues Creed’s theme of incrementality, as well as a questioning of what art is - you could easily go up and down the steps without realising that you were experiencing an artwork (whatever that means, of course).
Yet Work 1059 also raises ideas about the concept of place, and the use of these marbles only enforces this. This is a site specific work in more ways than one; Creed is not just responding to this staircase, but the preponderance of stairs in Edinburgh, as he tells, and half sings, in the video below.
While using 104 different examples of this material might seem to counter the idea of craft materials as having a unique provenance, arguably in Work 1059 the marbles work to amplify and even endow a sense of place to a site that previously did not have one - or not a favourable one in any case. When it comes down to it, materials are transformative of our relationship with place, whether they are from the site they are being used for not - just imagine visiting the White House if it was made of MDF.
