Ascalon
Image source St. George’s Cathedral
Artist: Marcus Canning, Christian de Vietri
Asset Type: Sculpture
Year of Work: 2011
Location: St George’s Cathedral, Cathedral Square Precinct, Perth, WA.
Provenance: City of Perth
Description: Ascalon seeks to create a space of contemplation, exhilaration, and inspiration. It distils the essence of St George mythology in a contemporary, abstracted rendition that is timeless in its relevance, evoking the greater archetypal truths that permeate from his story and how these truths pertain to the individual and to society, now and for centuries to come.
In Medieval Romance, ‘Ascalon’ is the name of the lance used by St George to slay the dragon. Here, the lance is rendered as a monumental tube that emits a single beam of light into the heavens at night. It is set into a large fragmented landscape of black epoxy coated steel plate. An abstracted representation of the slain body of the dragon, this highly detailed and complexly faceted terrain has a crack running along its central axis that emanates from the point where the lance has entered the petrified, fossilised, and fragmented form of the dragon.
At night, light shines up through the crack, illuminating the luminous white form suspended above it.
The third element to the work is a billowing white cloak form that wraps and warps in a single undulating plane around the lance. It is cast in white epoxy coated hybrid composite, and despite its large dimensions, holds an ethereal lightness alongside its elemental power.
The form is an abstraction of St George on his steed and also references the recurring cloak form that features in many depictions of St George across Western art history, usually operating as a field similar to a halo or angel’s wings. The form aims to evoke a sense of righteous power and victory over a force of darkness and oppression.
The form of Ascalon has been developed and modelled in a digital environment in collaboration with New York-based architect Eldad Lev, allowing for a seamless ‘press play’ transition to fabrication using the latest in 3D printing and digitally controlled sculpting machinery.
Perth-based structural engineering firm Capital House, who were behind the Kings Park Suspension Bridge, are the project managers of the Ascalon fabrication and site build, and they have, amongst other things, designed a customised dampening system to tune the form to the specific wind conditions of the site.
Spanda
Image source Jarrad Seng
Artist: Christian de Vietri, ShapeShift
Asset Type: Sculpture
Year of Work: 2016
Location: Geoffrey Bolton Avenue, Perth, WA.
Provenance: City of Perth
Description: Spanda is a 9 story-high sculpture made of carbon fiber located in Perth, Western Australia. It was commissioned for fabrication by the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority of Western Australia and installed at Elizabeth Quay in 2016.
Intended as an icon to uplift the city and its inhabitants, the idea of human identity being constituted of layers or sheaths was a starting point for the sculpture’s design. These layers represent the contours and constituents of the human experience, proceeding from gross to subtle as one moves from the periphery to the core. The exponential repetition of the arch form creates the impression of an infinite vibration, a pattern of self-similarity that is intended to trigger the viewer's inner experience of wholeness, the recognition of themselves as individual expressions of the universal, intimately interconnected, and one with their total environment.
The sculpture was designed to have a strong sense of presence without being imposing nor obscuring any building or vantage point. It is aligned with the site such that the curvature of the form contrasts with gridded square buildings behind it. The arch-like quality of the form is mysteriously functionless as it is neither an entrance nor an exit, but stands alone, declaring its own liminal space for the viewer to merge with. The structure was built by a team of expert digital fabricators and engineers who re-purposed carbon fibre manufacturing technology from the aerospace industry to enable a truly unique civil structure that would not have been possible in traditional materials.
The title of the work is a Sanskrit word meaning “divine cosmic vibration”. This term is used to describe how Consciousness generates and resorbs the manifest world by expanding and contracting in waves of its own expressive capacity. The sculpture is intended to be both a formal representation of this ‘spanda’ principle, and a tool, or means, to stimulate its experience.
“We praise that Śankara who is the source of the power of the wheel of energies by whose expansion (unmeśa) and contraction (nimeśa) the universe is absorbed and comes into being.” Kallaṭa, Spanda-kārikās (trans. Mark Dyczkowski)
