The true subject of Wingren’s sculpture is a clarity of form that resists being named or labeled. For him, seeing is a kind of deliberate forgetting in which one drops references in the act of pure awareness. The viewer is offered a glimpse of materials refined into essence - a language of rock, wood, motion, and stillness.
— Elizabeth Marglin
— Elizabeth Marglin
The Standing Stone series features geometric apertures hewn into monolithic blocks of black granite and steatite. The aperture in a Standing Stone creates a frame within the stone itself, so that the observer becomes conscious of the roughness of the natural surfaces and the primeval aspect of a stone torn from the earth. A new lightness is established, in balance with the grounded mass of the surrounding stone.
The Japanese kanji 間, graphically combines 戸 “door” and 日 “sun” to make 間 “Ma.” These principles established the Sunshaft Stone series and progressed an impulse to bring light into stone. Research into Scandinavian celestial traditions, combined with an established study of mathematics in nature, led to collaboration with John Stocke, professor of astronomy at University of Colorado Boulder to calculate the position of the sun at various geographic points at significant celestial moments. The results are rectangular cut stones, each pierced by an aperture carved at an angle so that a square of light is cast within the stone’s shadow at noon each solstice or equinox.
The form is not limited to the stone or space within the aperture; it includes the square of light on the ground and its significance to important dates of seasonal transition. If the Stone acts as a projector, and the shape of the light in the Stone’s shadow is the image, then the artist’s role here is that of interpreter between the elements and humanity, The Sunshaft Stone is a universal symbol; all people have a basic temporal and spatial relationship to the sun - where and when they exist.
The Helsinki Sunshaft Stone features three light shafts cut into the same stone. These subtracted volumes diverge from a single origin, detailing the striking difference in solar position at different times of year. The interior space described by these passages was architectural in nature; a transient space occupied by light. The desire to explore the nuances of sculpting the entire form within resulted in the Interiors series (2009).
From all sides, perforations open the interior of a solid block of stone. The resulting thresholds seem to unfold outward, inviting exploration. The sharp collisions of interior surfaces glow with subtle translucency. This expansive lightness, now contained, imbues a feeling of being within the stone, as both viewer and participant.
Changes in daylight illuminate the tonal variations in the stone and open up the interior volume cleaved into each work, creating an almost architectural presence. By emphasizing the role of chance in the final product-via light, pattern, and hand-worked planes-Wingren pushes a formal exercise in orderly negative space to become an evocative push-and-pull between material and intent.
Changes in daylight illuminate the tonal variations in the stone and open up the interior volume cleaved into each work, creating an almost architectural presence. By emphasizing the role of chance in the final product-via light, pattern, and hand-worked planes-Wingren pushes a formal exercise in orderly negative space to become an evocative push-and-pull between material and intent.