Cragg started making large bronze and steel sculptures in the mid-1980s. Several of the works from this period incorporate identifiable forms from nature. Cragg's early background included work in a laboratory and in a foundry. This experience, coupled with his interest in science and biology, often reveals itself in his art. In this piece a large mollusk shell rests on top of several musical instrument cases, which emerge from beneath the shell. One interpretation of this juxtaposition is to reference the "music" one hears when holding a shell to the ear.
Source: NEWS May June 2000
Tony Cragg came to sculpture through science and the process of observing things. He is inspired by the idea that nature develops by stages into culture. In Untitled (Conch Shell), the brass instrument cases tucked under the large mollusk shell reflect this thinking. A possible interpretation suggests that the instrument cases represent culture’s reproduction of nature’s case – the conch shell, which protects the primal “music” of blood flowing through body. The shell, overtaking the cases either by delivering or devouring them, suggests the philosophy that that which comes from the earth returns to it.
Exhibition HistoryStedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, May 13 - July 2, 1989
"Tony Cragg: XLIII Biennale di Venezia," Organized by the British Council, June 26 - Sept. 25, 1988
Images (2)
Audio (1)
Tony Cragg (British, 1949 – 2016)
Untitled (Shell), 1988
Run Time: 2:45
Recorded by Tony Cragg, artist / 1988
Untitled Conch Shell, that’s a little bit perverse isn’t it—it’s actually, shell, and then it’s not even a shell, because it’s actually a fossil of a shell. And it’s a fossil which I think it’s called Gryphaea. It’s a bivalve, and in English folk lore, it’s actually called “The Devil’s Toenail.” And they are very dark stone fossils of a creature that lived many millions of years ago. And the interest in the idea of a kind of harmonic in form. That materials arrange themselves in certain very specific patterns. And especially the more complicated arrangements of material that are associated with living forms. I mean, it’s still only atoms piled up on top of each other and doing things, but the structures have certain laws and rules to it, which we see, and we feel.
Also when you’re listening to music, there’s a lot of noise going on. A lot of sounds, if you like, going on. But there are certain notes, certain things, that actually hit something in our brains. They actually have a physical and even psychological mental effect on us. So pleasing, or not pleasing, and they can be very complicated, they can be mixed up, or given as half tones, or whatever. You arrive at harmonies and play with disharmonies, and so that’s the basis of music. So the way that the music world, our sound world, is ordered for us, which is related to these tones that we see, have a sudden orderliness about them. They find a correspondence in our nature that we react to.
Sometimes it seems more difficult when you’re looking at a visual world. The visual world is apparently, ultimately, more complicated. Or there are a lot more tone variations and harmonies of pitch and color and everything, and dark and textures, and whatever else. One could look out a window and assume it’s very chaotic. It looks kind of chaotic, but somehow if you look at the world enough, you then also see, little things, little rhythms in the world. You see the verticality of the trees and the grass, and even if one’s a big verticality or little verticalities, and you see the way that the things grow and spread out in space and whatever. So there is a kind of, as well, I won’t say there’s a sort of harmonic or musical effect, to make the whole thing sound much too lyrical. But there are a lot of basic formal structures to the visual world as well. Just simply put, it’s the harmonies of a naturally made object. And then coming to the harmony, the shapes and forms, of not the music instruments themselves, but the cases, that were made for musical instruments.
