Places in stone

Today in Hallein, Susanne Tunn and Hagbart Solløs spoke about the importance and many connotations of “place” in their work as sculptors.

Susanne Tunn is a sculptor from Germany. For her, “place” itself is sculptural. The location of her work is an integral part of it. She showed us images of some of her pieces in situ: on the roof of a building, in a barn, in a church. Her “Table for Two Couples and a Dog” is placed in a forest; and crucially, doesn’t include a table - the space, and the place, define the work. This interaction between the work and the location invites a very different way of viewing and interacting with the art work on the part of the viewer. She went on to suggest that modern architecture can also be sculpture, once more implying the importance of place.

Hagbart Solløs is a Norwegian artist whose work has been installed in prominent public spaces throughout Scandinavia. He began by considering the Roman concept of genius loci, the “spirit of place”. Such a concept has always been an important part of cultural production - and was crucial, for example, in European Romanticism - but Solløs instead highlighted the rise of a more economic world view in the last few centuries which shuns the mythology of place. More recently, however, the rise of the new science of “terra psychology” has sought to explain the semi-mystical aura of place. His own work develops these ideas, and in doing so has become an important part of urban environment and space in several cities. Placed in public space in Oslo, his monument to Hiroshima, “Pax”, 50 Years after Hiroshima, which incorporated stone taken from the devastated city, embraces these themes.