Earlier in the academic year, I visited the Talbot Rice museum. Here I saw the exhibition by Lucy Skaer, The Green Man. Skaer’s work is all about telling a story with materials. For example in one piece she uses materials such as glass and bronze to represent animals and objects. Skaer then lays these out in such a way that it tell the story that she has taken from a poem.

I was particularly intrigued by Skaer’s piece called Sticks and Stones. In this piece, Skaer created a piece of art using sinker mahogany with inserts of porcelain, limestone, tin, coins, copper, American walnut, tiger’s eye, carnelian and Tasmanian black wood. She then passed this piece onto a ceramicist who attempted to recreate the original piece using the tools they had at hand. Then the ceramic piece was passed onto someone with marble and they used only the previous piece to create their interpretation. This was repeated using aluminium, ply and maple with oak veneer, paper pulp, slate and finally jesmonite. At each stage the creators were only able to see the previous piece.
What drew me to this piece was how different each material made the piece feel. The atmosphere changed with the material that the art was made from and not much of the physical shape was changed.