About the Work
For his exhibition THEREHERETHENTHERE at Parc Saint Léger in Pougues-les-Eaux, France, Simon Starling created a piece called La Source, in which he laid out 1,036 black hand-blown glass spheres of six distinct sizes on a concrete floor. Though carefully positioned, to the viewer looking down upon the spheres the arrangement seemed abstract, and the buildings distorted in the reflection on the glass had a strange effect.
This photogravure features the six sizes of black spheres from the exhibition, laid out neatly in two rows with a bright reflection that reveals many more balls. The overall composition is simple, abstract, and striking.
About the Artist
Simon Starling’s work explores the relationship between art and craft, revealing a fascination with the processes, materials, and techniques involved in producing both manufactured goods and traditional handmade crafts. His practice often involves transforming one thing or substance into another, and his projects—which range from small artworks to large-scale installations to strange and interesting journeys—draw on ideas of nature, technology, and economics.
For his project Shedboatshed, winner of the 2005 Turner Prize, Starling took apart a wooden shed he found on the banks of the Rhine, turned parts of it into a boat and used the vessel to carry the remaining parts downriver to Basle, and then reassembled it as a shed in a Swiss Museum. In another notable project in 2004, Tabernas Desert Run, Starling crossed the Tabernas desert on a makeshift electric bicycle that produced only water as waste, which he used to paint an illustration of a cactus. Starling describes his work as “the physical manifestation of a thought process.”
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