A Sculptural Love Poem to Architecture
2012 | The cornerstone of inspiration for A Sculptural Love Poem to Architecture was laid years ago in Austin, Texas, where I worked as a stone carver’s apprentice. The job required an attention to detail and to the vocabulary of architecture and ornament. I became fascinated by the names of each element of the vast array of structures, shapes, and patterns that come together to complete the spaces we inhabit. Corbels, crockets, capitals, coves, trefoils, quatrefoils, tracery. The words and descriptions are often as elegant as the ornaments they describe.
A Sculptural Love Poem to Architecture combines this fascination with vocabulary and an appreciation for the elegance and detail of the architecture at Callanwolde Art Center in Atlanta. Photos of spaces and details throughout the main building were given to writer Terri McIntosh and poet Jennifer Wheelock, who invented names for what they saw in each image. I researched the actual name of each element. The imagined monikers and factual names were combined with images of the details and placed alongside an array of words so that viewers could make their own poetry with the elements of Callanwolde’s architecture. The building silhouettes use architectural terms from throughout the world in a magnetic poetry game, while reference books are on hand for those who are curious about the specifics of the terminology. My hope is that that viewers will carry the playful experience of the work with them when they leave the gallery and perhaps take notice of the elegance that exists in the details of the spaces they inhabit.