03 07 2020
– 19 09 2020

Dominika Skutnik. Sculpture of the Terrain vol. 2

Curator: Marta Wróblewska

Date: 03.07.20 – 19.09.20

Venue: Günter Grass Gallery, Szeroka 37


Sculpture of the Terrain
is a project authored by Dominika Skutnik, consisting in redefining the notion of sculpture per se – stretching its traditional definition by expanding artistic activity to include broadly understood research activities closely referring to a particular place. The artist was inspired by geological processes which, many thousands of years ago, subjected glacial erratics from Scandinavia to natural migration processes, as a result of which the rocks “wandered” to the other side of today’s Baltic. Owing to this, they are now an integral element of the Pomeranian landscape, and are natural foundations for many architectural objects in Gdansk and other places in the region. The artist focused on two main aspects of this process: materiality and temporality. In her project, she reflects on the imperceptible monumentality of the glacial erratics from Scandinavia that are ideally integrated with the urban and rural landscape, and on their obvious, timeless and voiceless presence. She tries to confront the natural process, manipulate it, reverse the order of things, return the original identity to the rocks-migrants, and discover their true story, which testifies that there are no boundaries in nature unless they are secondarily imposed by humans.

 

The Gdansk exhibition, which is a continuation of the creative process initiated upon the first edition of the Sculpture of the Terrain project in Sweden in 2019, focuses on the poetry of the local walls, structures, and foundations, on a turn towards locality and the assumed familiarity built on what the artist refers to as “ours-not-entirely-ours”. As a part of the creative process, the artist takes a close look at the structure of the castles in Bytów and Sztum, defensive walls in Skarszewy and Starogard, Granary Island in Gdansk, early ritual objects (such as the stone circles at Węsiory and Odry and the so-called stone baba standing by the Archaeological Museum in Gdansk), as well as tombstones and Gdansk pavements worn down by their daily users. Taken during the fieldwork, the photographs of architecture, ritual objects, sill plates, and archaeological test-pits are an integral part of the exhibition, along with its main protagonists – specimens of postglacial granites that the artist collected and transported for the purposes of the gallery exhibition.

 

In traditional understanding, “sculpture” is understood as one of the branches of the visual arts as well as a three-dimensional work which often has an architectural, commemorative or decorative function, and the origin of which is associated with a specific creative process consisting in the preparation of draft drawings and models, followed by the actual making of the final work in a concrete material, the specificity of which also dictates the process of work.

 

“Sculpture of the terrain” is a notion from geology. It defines forms of land resulting from both natural processes and human activity. The former are closely related to the internal energy of the Earth, which sets its masses in motion, or external factors having their sources in atmospheric or cosmic processes, the functions of which may be both creative and destructive. “Sculpture of the terrain” is also referred to as relief or morphology. If we think about it, these synonyms also point to creative processes – they are related to the building, forming, shaping, composing, and structuring. Hence, they are contact points with the artistic sculptural activity in its traditional understanding.

 

Classical sculpture usually fulfilled a specific function: it exposed a place, commemorated an event or a person, or was simply an aesthetic, ornamental feature. In her iconic essay Sculpture in the Extended Field, Rosalind Krauss pointed out that it was only modernism which detached sculpture from a pedestal and allowed its autonomy. This nomadity liberated from the enforced context of sculpture culminated in in the so-called land art, which started to rapidly develop towards the end of the 1960s. This genre of art positioned sculpture somewhere between architecture and landscape. It also turned attention to the very creative process, which in view of the often monumental activities covering huge areas of land, such as deserts, took on a different, more performative dimension. Rather than shape a certain concrete, independent object, the artist performed a creative intervention into the encountered tissue of the place, which he/she selected as the area of his/her actions. Therefore, the artistic act began to also largely consist in a creative experience of a given area. It also required increasingly specialist knowledge on not only the geographical characteristics of a given area, but also, often, its history (including the cultural history connected with the traditions, memory, and identity of a given place) and geological conditions affecting the materiality of the created work of art.

 

Therefore, we may consider the “sculpture of the terrain” as a sphere between nature and art, landscape and non-landscape, architecture and non-architecture, memory and non-memory, identity and anonymity, construction and destruction. Similarly as in geology, the process is marked by a different type of temporality – it is much more extended over time, just like the slow workings of nature, and thus almost imperceptible at short intervals. The effect is a work of art: on the one hand, one that is minimalistic, being limited to barely noticeable interventions (in this case into the structure of glacial erratics); on the other hand, however, a monumental one, if we take into consideration the territorial scale it encompasses, or the geological scale as a part of which it is understood.

 

We might say that the Sculpture of the Terrain project is a “sculpture-making process”, an action lying in an almost organic territorial and conceptual growth, as well as a multi-aspect construction: the construction of an object sensu stricto as well as a relation with the space of the landscape and with the exhibiting institutions, a co-dependency based on the equivalent dialogue between the particular actors in the process (artist, curator, researcher, and mason) and very broadly understood (artistic, scientific, and technical) methods of creation. The sculpture-making process is an open work, as it consists in long-lasting creation and the accompanying slow change. This is also the case with Dominika Skutnik’s Sculpture of the Terrain: its first edition took place at the Kulturcentrum Ronneby Konsthall in Sweden in 2019 and involved the return of the “borrowed” stones to their original habitat. The second edition at the Gdansk City Gallery is a local activity mapping the issues of permanence, historicalness, familiarity, and regionality. Everything seems to indicate that its further stages will be shaped as a result of subsequent accumulations of the energy of the Earth and the Artist.


We are grateful to
: Torun Ekstrand (curator of the exhibition Rzeźba terenu vol. 1 / Sculpture of the Terrain vol. 1 at the Kulturcentrum Ronneby Konsthall); Marek Frankowski, photography, co-organisation and logistics of the project; dr hab. Piotr Woźniak, Zakład Geomorfologii i Geologii Czwartorzędu, Uniwersytet Gdański / Department of Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology, University Of Gdansk; prof. dr hab. inż. arch. Aleksander Piwek, Katedra Historii Architektury i Konserwacji Zabytków Wydziału Architektury Politechniki Gdańskiej / Department of History, Theory of Architecture and Conservation of Monuments, Faculty of Architecture, Gdansk University of Technology; Antoni Piontek, Head of Production, POLGRAVEL Sp. z o.o.; Ryszard Burandt, Vice-President of the Board of Directors, Kruszywa Polskie S.A.; Danpol skrzynie transportowe

Grafika promująca wystawę "Rzeźba terenu".