Materially Speaking

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Born in Soissons, France, Emmanuel went to trade school at the age of 16 to learn how to renovate historical monuments by hand, specialising in granite. He spent some years restoring churches, cathedrals and monuments all over France until he felt the calling to create his own work as an artist.

He says women and the female form are a constant source of inspiration. Dance is a strong theme in his work and began with a homage he did for Martha Graham which lives in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Wallis Theatre in Beverly Hills, LA. The models he used from a French dance school in order to make that sculpture impressed him hugely and, he says, gave him a lifetime of inspiration, adding that he felt he was surrounded by walking sculptures.

For a recent show Emmanuel made a triptych of Exaltation – one carved in white marble, another cast in polished white bronze, and the third in natural bronze with a patina. He explains how he wanted to illustrate how the same subject feels completely different when created in a different material.

Emmanuel displays his extraordinary carving skills in his portrayals of Kinbaku – the Japanese art of tying rope around a person using visually intricate patterns, typically with several pieces of thin rope (often jute, hemp or linen). He believes the practice is empowering because the people are not tied in their mind, in fact they are very free.

While Emmanuel was carving in white, bianco p and statuario marble, some of his black women friends asked why he didn’t sculpt black women. He says, ‘I felt like, well, I’m not going to sculpt a black woman in white marble. It kind of doesn’t make sense because part of their beauty is their colour. I mean, it’s not a colour, but it’s being black. So I went to a quarry in Belgium and purchased some beautiful black marble blocks. And it’s really an homage to them. And I hope they’re happy, but I think a lot of them, they express their contentment.’

Emmanuel describes how he was affected by the fires in California and the south of France. He admires the resilience of nature whereby a forest is reborn afterwards, growing back twice as beautiful. It was then that he started to make pieces with burnt wood.

Emmanuel comes from a family with a famous painter, Jean Cousin the Elder. Cousin was a Renaissance painter who painted Eva prima Pandora in 1500, which is in the Louvre, Paris.

Emmanuel and I met at Massimo Galleni Studios, who specialise in reproducing classical sculptures, just outside Pietrasanta. He also referred to Mario Tavarelli who showed Emmanuel around when he first arrived in Carrara in 1995. Mario was the owner of a marble company and had guided the novelist Irving Stone during his research for his book on Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy.

emmanuelfillion.com

instagram.com/fillionsculptures

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Lucy Dickens is an artist and illustrator, whose works exudes humour. Close friends since the age of three, Lucy and Sarah ramble and percolate over Lucy’s upcoming show.

As a great, great granddaughter of writer Charles Dickens, writing plays an important part in Lucy’s life. Her paintings often have a narrative quality, leaving you wondering what went before, or what will happen next. As well as humour, her recent work contains a lot of vibrant colour and exuberance.

After school Lucy studied fashion journalism and started as a stylist at Condé Nast, where she soon became fashion editor of Brides magazine. Her passion for materials, and how people express themselves through fashion, continues to this day. When she started her own family she began writing and illustrating childrens’ books which were published in London and New York.

This May she has a show at Cricket Fine Art and as the catalogue arrived she and Sarah flick through it with Lucy explaining the background behind the pictures. She says she likes to portray groups of people and works in many mediums from oils, acrylics and gouaches, to bold graphic fabric collages. The series of Japanese paintings reflect her love of travel.

Lucy often puts in a cameo appearance in her own work. A self-portrait below shows her framed within a picture At the Picasso Museum and again in Cyclists and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner where you can she her as a passenger peeping out of the back of a bus, centre left of painting.

A great observer of people, lover of dogs and fan of London, Cyclist and Whippets, Hyde Park Corner speaks of Lucy’s skill to snatch a view from a bus and make it immortal.

Lucy comes from a creative family. Her mother Julia Dickens paints, while her sister Sophie Dickens is a renowned sculptor whose work you can see at Sladmore Contemporary Gallery, or on her website: sophiedickens.co.uk.

lucydickens.com

instagram.com/lucy_mdickens

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Welcome back to a second series of Materially Speaking – where artists and artisans tell us their stories through the materials they choose. 

In these snapshot stories, they tell us about their journey to become an artist, and the inspirations for their work. Along the way, they explain why they have chosen different materials to work with at different stages of their careers.

Materially Speaking began with interviews from artists and artisans working near Pietrasanta in northern Italy, where generations of artists have come since Michelangelo first arrived over 500 years ago to source marble for his Pietà.

We are taking a break for the summer but we have already started recording new interviews and look forward to sharing more artists’ stories later this year. We will continue our conversations with artists who work, or have worked, around the area of Pietrasanta and will discover how the current pandemic has influenced them.

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Sollai Cartwright takes inspiration from everything around him creating both abstract and figurative work.

Sollai talks about his favourite stone, Bianco P, and how it responds to chisels while holding its form. He speaks about the historical resources of the area around Pietrasanta and of the extensive range of historical tools available, especially at the renowned Milani Tools shop. He describes how each tool has a different relationship with a different stone.

In 2019, Sollai exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe and Bondi and had a solo show at Harvey Galleries in Mosman, Sydney, Australia.

From the age of seven, Danica, who would go on to marry Sollai, trained as a gymnast and trampolinist, later becoming an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil where she and Sollai met. She explains a little about their team work approach with her doing the management and marketing of his art.

Sollai mentions the power of having a mentor and cites the guidance he received from Douglas Robinson, a Canadian sculptor who has also spoken to Materially Speaking.

Sollai comes from a family of artists and you can hear the stories of his father, Michael Francis Cartwright; mother, Shona Nunan and brother, Jacob Cartwright all on Materially Speaking. In 2018, along with the rest of his family, he showed his work in Australia House, London in an exhibition that celebrated a centenary since its construction on the Strand.

sollai.com

instagram.com/sollai.cartwright.sculptor

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Born into an artistic family in Australia, Jacob has been living in Italy, on and off, since he was two-years-old. He began his musical training very young and brings these sensibilities to his art. All the music in this episode was composed by Jacob.

The Embrace series was inspired by a hug Jacob’s wife Jacqueline gave him. He explains that when his wife gave him a hug he saw a certain form. This form became a piece and this piece then developed into a series of work about the embrace. He also feels that his deep links with music played a part in influencing the outcome. He says, ‘It’s a beautiful subject matter because an embrace is a paradox: giving and receiving at the same time. It’s like two things at once and everything at once’.

Jacob loves carving wood and working to optimise its fibre and grain, discovering how it might split or break. He describes his love of the textures of wood and explains both the process of burning wood and using the burnt wood with oil to make a patina. Sometimes in making a sculpture he will cover whole sections of wood with nails.

Jacob usually worked with the aid of machinery but admits that he hasn’t yet made up his mind about whether or not to use a robot in future. When health and safety regulations around dust became an issue, Jacob decided to embrace a change within his studio and reverted to working marble by hand and avoid machinery altogether. He tells us how this meditative way of working influences his life.

jacobcartwright.com

instagram.com/jacobcartwrightartist

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Christian Lange apprenticed as a chiseller in Freiburg, Germany, and started out as a stonemason restoring churches before coming to Pietrasanta to try his luck as an artist. Then he fell in love and his work took a slightly different direction. He decided to build his career as an artisan and now creates ornamental pieces and sacred art, as well as collaborating with artists to realise their visions in marble.

He talks about the responsibility of selecting a block of marble to work on, outlining some of the challenges in finding the right piece for a particular work.

Christian also teaches sculpting courses and has his own apprentices. He reflects on the new technology acknowledging that an air hammer or electric powered chisel, ubiqitous in sculpting today, would be considered a devil’s tool by the artisans of a hundred years ago. He laments the dearth of young apprentices coming up the ranks. In his day, he says ‘the apprenticeship was three years where we worked only by hand. No electric power tools, no air pressure, everything with really very old-fashioned hand-tools. Slow. But for learning, I still believe that learning something slowly is probably better.’

He loves the challenge of making figurative work but says that it is more expensive because it takes much more time.

marbleartwork.com

Stagetti Marble Studio

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Rita Meier learned the direct carving technique from artisans and the international community of artists in the studios around Pietrasanta. In this episode she talks about the grades of hardness of various stones and describes the process of carving.

Inspired by organic shapes, Rita discusses her seed pods series which she sees as the carriers and protectors of future lives, always perfectly adapted to survive in their environment.

Rita describes her fascination for limpets, very old beings which cling to almost anything while cleaning the water they live in. She loves their shapes and wanted to carve them into the surface of marble, as they appear in nature.

‘It started out with leftover pieces of statuario,’ she says. ‘Since they were not cut but removed manually with one blow of the hammer, the crystalline surface remains untouched, looking like snow glittering in the sun.’

She had the idea to carve limpet fossils on some river rocks of marble she had, adding a natural iron-coloured patina. Though fossils don’t appear naturally in Carrara marble, Rita played around and carved ‘fossils’ into the marble so that they look almost real.

Rita Meier at INTRECCIArte

instagram.com/ritameiersculpture/

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Californian artist Neal Barab says his work is variously influenced by Mexican pre-Colombian art, art from the Cyclades, African art, Japanese anime such as My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki and cartoons.

Recently he’s been working on a series of ‘personaggi’, or characters – human and animal – carved from multicoloured stones, some painted. Neal says ‘I’m wanting my pieces to be not just sculptures but living creatures.’ Their personalities are deliberately vibrant.

He talks about particular pieces he prepared for his show. Big Dog and Lil Dog are made from marble and olive wood from his own olive trees. When Neal does his ‘potatura,’ or pruning of trees, he’s always on the lookout for bits that might contribute to a sculpture. Trav Fem is a female form with splendid hair made out of crystal formations.

He also shows one of the ping-pong tables he created, this one made from four pieces of marble with a yellow piece acting as a net.

nealbarab.art

instagram.com/nealbarab

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When Almuth Tebbenhoff came to London in the late 1960s she started from scratch: learning a new language, finding a job and studying to be a potter.

A decade later, a lucky meeting with Eduardo Paolozzi gave her the chance to study at the Royal College of Art where drawing classes, lectures and conversations with other artists led her from the world of ceramics to a wider range of materials.

Almuth first came to Pietrasanta to work in marble in 2006. She talks about a few special projects she created in stone including a series of interlocked nutshell type boats, which appear to toss and turn on their journey.

Another commission, Flow, lived outside the Salisbury Museum and reflects Almuth’s fascination for patterns made by water. It’s this piece which she was restoring on the day Sarah Monk went to interview her.

tebbenhoff.org

instagram.com/almuthtebbenhoff

Almuth is vice-president of the Royal Society of Sculptors