Peter Bevan Artist in Residence Hunter College, CUNY, March - May 2001

“The Flower is a leaf mad with love” Goethe

This exhibition attempts to synthesise two ongoing concerns from my recent sculptural practice; representations of the human body and flowers.

For ten years I have explored different ways of signifying human bodily presence and qualitative human energy through, reductive, hollow forms, the inherent expressiveness of different materials and architectural metaphor. Three years ago I began to work with the forms of plants or specifically, buds as metaphors for another kind of natural energy; the energy of fertility resulting in renewal and change.

But it was most recently through reading essays by two choreographers and teachers of Modern Dance that my instinctive but tentative desire to try to merge these two “energies “ was confirmed. Doris Humphreys says ‘The human body is the most powerful expressive medium there is. It is quite possible to hide behind words, or to mask facial expression’ ‘But the body reveals. Movements and gesture are the oldest languages known to man. They are still the most revealing. When you move you stand revealed for what you are’ this kinaesthetic sense is to a large extent, the experiential structure through which I understand most sculptural sculpture, reading the quality and gesture of their forms, the nature of materials used and their relationships through the memory and presence of my own body.

Jose Limon develops his teachers passion describing in detail the expressive essence and potential of each part of the human anatomy and says of the chest ‘(it) can be made empty, to fall inwards and downwards to an utter inversion, a defeat. It can rise with the breath, like a plant growing up and out from the pelvis and there be suspended, noble and affirmative and aspiring. It can extend beyond this to attitudes of pride and arrogance and overextended further to the comic, the pompous, the absurd. This region of the chest, the breath, is the fecund source of movement and its range is limited only by ones inventiveness and imagination’

In the weeks preceding the residency, I regularly worked on paper in three ways;

(1) Drawing from life to expand and inform my innate understanding of the structure of the human torso and of how the chest could indeed grow out of the pelvis ‘like a plant’.

(2) Collaging together images of plants and patterned clothing to generate formal and potential sculptural relationships but without precisely defining them.

(3) Using drawing imaginatively to anticipate problematic issues in the eventual translation from drawing to three dimensions. It appeared then that the challenge of making sculpture in ceramic on the residency would be to make these imaginations credible.

The highly anthropocentric quotation form Goethe (also so poetic and succinct) describing the extraordinarily sexual metamorphosis of plants from growing shoot to full flower, gave me an unambiguous and entirely inspiring title for the work.

I am very grateful for the opportunity the residency has offered me to pursue these ideas in sculpture, specifically for the financial support given by The Hope Scott Trust (Scotland), The Glasgow School of Art, the generosity of Hunter College, and especially for the support of Jeff Mongrain, Jo Hloska and Roberta Bongianino in achieving the exhibition. I am also indebted to the many students in Ceramics whose interest, curiosity and comments energised the whole process of making.

Finally, I thank my wife for causing me to read about Modern Dance.

May 2001