Archive No. 11
Material Exploration in Savoy Cabbage and Brass
Location: Bay of Plenty · Year: 2025
Medium: savoy cabbage over a filling that stays unseen, pickled red pepper drops, chilli threads, apples; brass, mother-of-pearl, black linen
Concept: Leaf laid over what stays unseen.
Concealment carries this material exploration, since whatever covers a form decides how the form is read. Choosing to cover is choosing to be doubted. Vegetal Cladding borrows its argument from architecture, where covering a surface counts as authorship rather than modesty. Hands lay each course over the one before, judging overlap by eye, letting tones fall where they fall. Seams stay where the work put them. No join is smoothed away.
Subtleties came between courses once, sculptures carried in, set down, and taken apart later at the table by those who had waited for them. Preservation was never the intention, and worth was counted in the hour a thing was allowed to hold. Appetite decides such matters, and anything built for a table accepts that in advance. Material exploration begins where a recipe would end, at the moment the form stops being a dish and starts being a proposition.
Brass, apples, black cloth, and no softening anywhere. Material exploration reaches the metal too: warmth against cold, shine against matte, and Radical Elegance permits no reconciliation between them. Six apples sit at even distance, placed rather than scattered, closing the composition the way a colonnade closes a façade. Apples stay unpolished, since shine would turn them into props, and props belong to a different kind of table. Pickled red drops and chilli threads mark the surface where the eye needs to stop, colour rationed rather than distributed.
Sculpture asks for permanence, cooking asks for none, and the work lives inside that quarrel, taking patience from one and directness from the other. Nothing is cut. Whole, the piece keeps what it promises out of sight, and what waits beneath the cladding answers a different question from the one the surface asks. Pieces built to this standard are made for one room, once.
