Material Study No. 1

Design   Elizabeth Lenny
Manufacturer Elizabeth Lenny
Made in  Toronto, Canada
Dimensions  H 27.6cm x W 34.8cm x D 4cm
Colour & Materiality Alabaster, alabaster dust, pewter, maple frame

Part of Elizabeth Lenny's 2024 Exhibition 'Registering Time'.  

The exhibition presents a series of works that use the dust left over from the carving process through casting. Rather than making separate items, one additive, one subtractive, the work combines the carved and the cast.

The title of the exhibition references a book by Jenny Odell - Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock. Within the book Odell explores the non-human world’s relationship to time, and how time is tracked and recorded by natural processes. She states “Look again at the pebbles. Make no mistake: they really are two things at once: seafloor from the last ice age and future sand.” Using this quote as a starting point, the work seeks to compress time, making visible the multiplicity of the materials.

'Registering Time' focuses on the materiality of alabaster: from the texture and the fissuring of the rock, its reaction to my hand that carves it, and the by-product from that process of carving, which refers back to the stone’s formation. With each cut the material’s history becomes more abstract. A cut reveals the lines of grain, which refer to the material’s transformation while simultaneously suggesting a reaction to tools. With each operation perspective changes, and the material becomes another, though its properties still refer to its potential and past.

These works ask how we register time, but also how we understand process, and completion. The materials and the objects that come from them are a physical witness and record of events, some of which happened long ago and some of which are still occurring.