Kirsteen Pieterse

Clouds Peak – Cathay Pacific Business Class Lounge / HKIA

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.

Install S/S sculpture at Suncorp Bank, Sydney

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.