San Lorenzo Trilogy
Sculptural installation, 1998
Steel (#1, #3), stained mdf (#2)
Timber fabrication: Mick Stickland and Stef Willis
Metalwork: Michael Sanders
San Lorenzo Trilogy was first installed at the 97-99 Gallery, London, in 1998, in a joint exhibition with the performance artist Julian Maynard Smith. In the accompanying catalogue, Michael Archer writes that they emerge ‘out of a meditation on both the architecture of the Renaissance, and the coherent visual regime by means of which that architecture was represented’. This meditation coalesces around the spaces of San Lorenzo in Florence: ‘What we are confronted with here is the desire to see certain aspects of this building: the Donatello sarcophagus of Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy, Michelangelo’s niche sculptures in the New Sacristy, and the staircase of the library vestibule. […]
Palpably present they intimate the absent architecture that occasioned them. Within their structures, features such as flights of steps, horizontal planes, apparent resting or vantage points both echo the furniture of those originary spaces, and throw a burden of thought onto the spectator. Abstracted from Brunelleschi’s or Michelangelo’s own tectonic and narrative imperatives they connect more directly with the imperatives of the body: when and how it must sit, lie or stand, and beyond that what implications might there be in adopting one or other position or posture’.