Artist’s note

Pitchshifter (2021)

I accidentally stumbled upon three magnificent and sizable slabs of wood as we took a wrong turn into a back street in Vientiane. They were casually lying around in a grassy plot next to the remnants of a cut down tree. As Donna and I parked the car to see if there was anything useful in the pile, a man approached and after some short, but mutually satisfactory negotiation we loaded the slabs into the back of our truck. A few months later I started working on one of them over the course of a long summer in semi-lockdown. The borders were still technically closed and although it might have been possible to visit Europe, we decided to stay put in Laos given all the logistics of travelling, including quarantining, opening up a sea of time to work on a new sculpture.

I played around with sketches of ellipses, isoclines, soundwaves and the Doppler effect in my initial designs, looking for a repeating and expanding pattern that would suit the dimensions of the wood - which was from a Burmese padauk tree presumably: Pterocarpus macrocarpus. A leading inspiration during the process was music (I cannot work on any piece without listening to music which provides the drive to keep going for hours, deep into the night all too often; so I guess it was about time to give it some sort of homage). The piece, rather coincidentally, resembles the body of a guitar, my preferred instrument after all, but I was more thinking of sound, pitch and modulation in the design stage. In retrospect I can see a subconscious influence of the torqued ellipses of Richard Serra that are exhibited in the Guggenheim in Bilbao but that is more an afterthought if anything and certainly not on the scale of those huge metal structures, made with such incredible mathematical precision. As I look at it now, I like to imagine the piece as materialized music. But then I might think of a growing embryo, or the ever expanding universe. Pythagoreans used to believe in a cosmic music created by the harmonic distances between the planets, musica mundana, so there is an overarching theme there perhaps. Perhaps.

One thing is for sure: I never regret taking that wrong turn.