Short Film 'Overgrown' 2014

At the Vimeo link above is a short film of my paintings made by Kent Wilson at The Hawthorn Town Hall Art Gallery a couple of years ago. Exhibition entitled 'Overgrown'. Text from the exhibition below.

Overgrown

2014

Among the rambling bushes it lies lost: a piece of stone carved lovingly by a stone mason whose skills with his mallet and chisels was delicate and masterful in the way he guided the forged, tempered tools to carve beautiful lines upon and within the body of the stone. From handmade templates, the tracery of the stone was brought into being with an accuracy and artfulness, more deft and elegant than the cheaper casting of a contemporary concrete mould.

The stem of the runner grows thicker and longer; sprouting its spiky leaves and purple

lustrous fruit around the body of the stone. There is a green gluey sap that fastens the expanding plant onto its ageing surface. It appears to be almost fully absorbed but not quite as I pull the plant away to reveal its late Romanesque lines. The chevron moulding can just be seen. Faces emerge from darker spaces between the stems and foliage. Their almond eyes look up at me constant and unblinking.

Four hundred million years it took to form this sedimentary rock from the falling sand at the bottom of the ocean: within which, it was pressed further and further down into the underlying bedrock, until the millions of sandy particles bonded and banded together two hundred feet below in the undersea darkness. The quarry from which the stone was taken, stands today in broad daylight, bathed in October's crisp morning sunshine.

Standing at the base of the quarry's cliffside, the master mason makes his choice before the stone is drilled carefully and wedged off the sheer mass of the cliff face. The stone is loaded on to a large cart pulled by two great horses down a muddy path that leads to a stone mason's lodge at the centre of a small hamlet thirty miles away. The lodge is attached to a new church that will sit at the centre of this growing parish.

At the lodge inside the sculptor's studio, the stone is loaded carefully onto the stone mason's banker, waiting to be transformed into the beautiful object I see now, lying beneath the veins of the expanding poisonous plant. The church stands nearby, renovated recently: transformed into a pink and orange apartment.

Copyright David Glyn Davies 2014