Aurora Sculpture

A site specific sculpture designed for the Foyer of the Aurora building provided a unique opportunity for the two sculptors to work together on a single design. For the first time one of Meliesa’s hand modelled life size figures has been rendered using Will’s cast filigree-bronze method. A truly collaborative sculpture and one that could only have been produced by an artist-run foundry, the technical complexity of the sculpture is the culmination of their twenty years of hard won expertise. It is a unique and individual work that can never be cast a second time.

Given an open brief by Developer, David Rice of Urban Construct, the artists were able to elaborate on the theme suggested by the name of the building.  The name of the Southern and Northern lights, the word “Aurora”, derives from the Roman name for the Goddess of Dawn and the Greek name for the north wind.

The Aurora phenomenon occurs when the solar wind is swept into Earth's magnetic field. Solar particles enter the magnetosphere and are captured by the magnetotail. The kinetic energy of electrons is converted to visible light, when charged particles colliding in the atmosphere take quantum leaps. Aurorae are shaped by Earth's magnetic field. Each curtain consists of many parallel rays that spiral around the magnetic field lines at the North and South Poles.

The new sculpture combines facets of these ideas. Often an Aurora event will look like a walking figure as the clouds of particles swirl and move. The bronze is a figure, rendered like a drawing in air, constructed of sweeping and curving parallel lines. Completely ephemeral, fragile and yet there, fragmented and yet whole, the missing pieces describe their own shapes in the mind's eye. When slowly moving around the sculpture, the play of light ripples through the outer surface, onto the inside reverse shapes of the body. The changing lines become like energy moving through muscles, adding a bio-morphic effect, bending and changing the way you see it. The static figure becomes a still point in flux, an apparition in motion - like the Aurora phenomena itself.

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