I’ve recently installed two wall sculptures at Raffles Hotel Shenzhen Bay, China. The images below are of the sculptures on the beautiful concrete factory floor.
My wall sculpture “Cloud’s Peak” was recently installed in the reception space in Cathay Pacific’s newly refurbished Business Class Lounge, The Pier, at Hong Kong International Airport. This work responds to the mountains skirting the airport’s location and is a continuation of my recent practice.
Chinese landscape painting, scholar stones and contemporary pre-fabricated engineering are the inspiration for this sculpture. The Shan-shui (“mountain-water”) school of Chinese landscape painting depicts natural mountainous landscapes traditionally painted enshrouded in mist and cloud. This wall sculpture seeks to capture the essence of the mountains and the cloud. It is intended for the work to be somewhere in the middle, neither mountain nor cloud, but it could be both.
Since ancient times the scholar stone has been considered a spiritual condensation of the vital essence of the landscape, representing a world in miniature. With stones in their studios, Eastern scholars can get intimately close to nature and wander through the mountains in their minds. It is the intension of this wall sculpture to encourage the viewer to do a similar thing, but to wander through the landscape as it is, now.
My latest work is featured in World Sculpture News!
“Kirsteen Pieterse makes sculptures that are deeply felt contemplative expressions of the ephemeral qualities of the world. Whether she is realizing a cloud formation or a precarious structure, there is an uncanny tautness at play. Her art is as far from the remorseless presence of metropolitan commerce and conflict as one can get, which is one of its subtle pleasures…”
Chinese landscape paintings, scholar stones, contemporary, urban and infrastructure related engineering are the inspiration for my current body of work.
The Shan-shui (“mountain-water”) school of Chinese painting depicts natural mountainous landscapes traditionally painted enshrouded in mist and cloud.
Since ancient times the scholar stone has been considered a spiritual condensation of the vital essence of the landscape, representing a world in miniature. With stones in their studios, Eastern scholars can get intimately close to nature and wander through mountains in their minds.
My scholar stones are firmly located in time with associations of modern urban engineering projects and prefabricated construction.
My sculpture, Subsist, is a ‘skeleton’ of a tree trunk, constructed in stainless steel. Depicted in a ruined state, the trunk has been ‘broken’ from the top. While Subsist acknowledges architecture through the use of the constructed cross-bracing motif, its primary reference is to the Romantic artists’ use of the solitary ruined tree in the Sublime landscape.
The heroic decay of mighty trees is a subject explored by painters and photographers of the mid nineteenth century who were searching for the ‘picturesque’. A solitary, damaged tree stands as evidence of the physical power of the landscape and natural forces such as storms and lightning strikes.
Subsist pays debt to this classical European tradition. But equally it acknowledges Harold Cazneaux’s celebrated 1937 Flinders Ranges’ photograph, Spirit of Endurance, where the solitary gum tree stands with its roots exposed yet still clinging to the arid landscape.
Subsist attempts to combine our human sympathies for such venerable trees, the aspirations of the Gothic, and the motif of constructed modernity.
Last week I popped in to mindustry.hk headquarters to record a radio interview with John Wong. We had a great conversation and touched on the topics below –
You can listen to the full interview here…
“專訪修讀藝術及建築的蘇格蘭藝術家Kirsteen Pieterse 分享她多年在澳洲及香港的創作經驗及感受, 精彩內容包括：
Interview Scottish artist Kirsteen Pieterse who studied Art and Architecture, sharing her years of Art making experience and impression at Australia and Hong Kong. Amazing Details as follow :
– 由倒塌的碼頭到濃霧中的大廈如何成爲一件雕塑
– from a collapsed pier and building in fog, how they become a sculpture
– 以不同的物料表達藝術家的意念
– use of different materials to express an artist’s ideas
– 人造建築及大自然的對衡
– human vs natural landscape
– 中國山水及供石變成藝術品
– turn Chinese San shui and scholar stone into an art piece
– 澳洲與香港藝術芬圍的比較
– Comparison of Art environment between Australia and Hong Kong”