Sculpture by the Sea Cottlesloe 2023.

Urgent Star is a very simple, and yet surprisingly powerful installation, and the secret of its impact lies first of all in its inventive use of the space it occupies. Including the natural features of the site in the work’s conception, the artist created an installation that blends seamlessly into its environment while also drawing attention to its unique qualities. Painted on the horizontal surface of a grassed terrace, its borders are dictated by the two retaining walls, one rising above it, one descending from it. From above, and in abstraction, two white lines that enclose a strip: in the physical world, the inescapable
preponderance of the third dimension.

In the Middle Ages, people thought that plants strive upwards towards each one’s own star: a doctrine of correspondences that saw the same harmonies reflected as above, so below. We now know that the sun is the main star for pretty much of all of them, and since plants do the work of synthesising the sun’s energy for us, it is quite appropriate to use one to represent the other. In the centre, the blades of grass become the magmatic flows of molten hydrogen and helium on the star’s surface; aided in the task
by the sun itself, as the white paint maximises reflection of the already powerful light.

Alba d’Oltrevita