Before turning to marble, Isotta Page made large-scale sculpture. The works in this archive, including Ponder Peace, Phantom Twilight and Phantom Blaze, were commissioned and conceived for specific sites.
Ponder Peace began with a material. At Podere Calzone, a vineyard and eco farm in Umbria, massive styrofoam forms had been used to cast the concrete arches of the estate’s wine tasting room. Once the concrete set, the forms were waste. Page carved them with hot wire tools, reinforced them with fiberglass and resin so they would last outdoors, and finished them in a range of patinas, an interest in surface that still runs through her work.
Archaeological remains found on the property shaped the concept. The garden became an imagined archaeology, laid over a site that is very much active today. Its ten sculptures read as remnants of a mythic past, each tied symbolically to the estate and its life as a working farm.
That narrative carries from the garden into the two interior commissions that followed. Phantom Twilight, in the wine tasting room, is an altarpiece of floating elements centered on a setting sun. Phantom Blaze hangs above the fireplace in the apartment upstairs, a sheet of molten fabric whose folds suggest a female body. Both open out like wings and draw on the drama of Baroque drapery. Set hard in fiberglass and resin, the cloth looks soft and the solid looks liquid.
Isotta Page carves deep time. Her material is Carrara quarry offcuts, the industrial leftovers of centuries of extraction. Working by hand, she makes marble sculpture at a human scale, shaping forms inspired by the origins of the stone itself, from the ancient sea life it was made from to the mountains it became. Her practice grew out of an art historian's eye, formed growing up among the marble ruins of Rome, yet it is distinctly of this moment, shaped by research into geology and the Anthropocene. She sets out to make marble light, using patinated steel to suspend the stone and create floating sculptures. Marble is one of the few materials that is time made physical, and her work uses it to unsettle our narrow, human sense of time. Each sculpture is an access point to the long history that led to us, and to what will remain of us.
Anvil
2022, 95 x 130 x 30 cm, fiberglass, resin, styrofoam, oxidized copper, steel wire and decommissioned steel farm equipment
Part of the Ponder Peace sculpture garden, Anvil is suspended between two trees on a raised area of land in the estate’s oak forest. It floats with an almost spiritual presence, like a religious icon. The work is a tribute to Podere Calzone’s working life as a vineyard and eco farm. Its oxidized copper patina lifts the form from tool to symbol, so an object known for weight and strength appears almost weightless. Below it, rusted steel spikes from old farm equipment that once plowed the surrounding fields are shown as sculpture in their own right.
Part of the Ponder Peace sculpture garden, Anvil is suspended between two trees on a raised area of land in the estate’s oak forest. It floats with an almost spiritual presence, like a religious icon. The work is a tribute to Podere Calzone’s working life as a vineyard and eco farm. Its oxidized copper patina lifts the form from tool to symbol, so an object known for weight and strength appears almost weightless. Below it, rusted steel spikes from old farm equipment that once plowed the surrounding fields are shown as sculpture in their own right.