“My work views contemporary disposable culture of today through the lens of antiquity. Using methods, materials and iconography from ancient art, I create objects that are contemporary antiquity ruins, castaways, like the shed skins peeled from statuary and inhabiting a place neither entirely solid nor totally anchored in historical reference. However, it is a place where the past becomes human and relatable to the present as something reclaimed, as an image that can endure.
The persistence of imagery is linked in my work to the persistence of the physical artwork. The 20th Century was a time of great innovation and improvisation, but with all this invention came impermanence and displacement, a continuous cycle of obsolescence. By contrast, faced with a shrinking planet, the 21st Century has to find ways forward that rethink and repurpose our practices of making and keeping art, to winnow down their carbon half-life (the duration of their impact on the environment) to a more responsible and limited impact. Creating painstakingly, hand crafted, artworks using artisanal methods and natural materials, I invest my creativity in expressions that are the distillation of long investments of creative time. I call this way of making art, Long Art, because time, the time invested into the artwork, elevates its sustainability while at the same time, mitigating the carbon half life. That is why, the persistence of imagery and the persistence of the artwork are linked.
The Tree of Life Which Is Ours, exemplifies this way of working and thinking about art. I began work on this piece in 2017. with a creative arc that encompasses five years. The artwork started as a study in earth clay that contained the seed of an idea . Through repeated manipulations of the original, making molds of it and transforming it through iterative reinterpretation I transformed the clay into wax shells of the original which I could manipulate and distress.
Concurrently, with this studio art practice, was my gathering of driftwood and flotsam from the ocean coastline near my studio in ProvincetownI bring these beachcombings into the studio, combining and casting from them, to create composites of the beachcombings and hand sculpted pieces. The process goes back and forth until the boundaries between what is found, and what is formed are gone, Such was the second inventive phase in the creation of the Tree of Life Which Is Ours. Mixing beachcombings and wax fragments of my studio pieces, a new sculpture took shape. Following the natural remnants, some forms became tree-like legs, others grew into a semblance of wings. The “fin” artifacts of the castings, which I preserved also took on associations, gradually defining themselves as leaves surrounding a figure that was both emerging and hiding in its cocooning forms. Over the process of developing, the sculpture began to reveal itself. This is the beauty of giving your artwork time to grow, so that the identity of the artwork is not imposed by the artist onto the artwork, but rather presets itself to the artist, whose job then is to enable the artwork to become., What I discovered was that its connection to the driftwood was important and I needed to understand what it meant. So I followed the artwork’s lead and learned about Ghost Forests and their connection to the growing presence of driftwood remains. The process of the wings growing from driftwood, the leaves developing out of the sculpture casting process, the whole connection of the figure to its tree body lead me to a revelation.
In popular culture, the artist’s eureka moment is usually portrayed, a priori, before the work is made, and the artist launches deliriously into a creative frenzy. But my experience is the inverse of that. The eureka comes at the end, and the artist is shown what they were creating by the artwork itself. So it was with this sculpture. It, explained itself with clarity and taught me, its meaning, not the other way around. I found in the sculpture, the goddess Daphne, the spirit of moving waters, who, chased by the sun Apollo, escaped him by becoming a tree. Born free flowing but now bound to the earth in tree-form, her fate and existence linked to that of the forests. Her safety from the sun, only as durable as the life of her tree. In this myth, I saw the parable of humanity’s current peril. The early warning sign of sea level rise, which presents as Ghost Forests, along our coasts is a harbinger of the disruption to our world that climate change and the impacts of sea level rise will unleash. Daphne knows her fate is bound to tress, but collectively, we are still learning what Daphne already knows.
Creating an artwork in Provincetown for the waterfront of Venice, both cultural centers existentially threatened by sea level rise, the meaning and the form of the artwork became clear. The Tree of Life Which Is Ours seeks to bring attention to the the peril we face. This tree is us, our life and our connection to the earth. We are all connected to the fate of trees, all threatened by climate change.
While creating this sculpture and learning from it, I listened repeatedly to the Second Symphony, “Under the Trees, Voices” of the late Italian composer, Ezio Bosso. This sonorous piece of music has become the soundtrack for the artwork, and for me, is inexorably connected to it. I would like to dedicate the Tree of Life Which Is Ours to Bosso’s composition with gratitude for the gift of inspiration his music has given. I look forward to sharing what creating this sculpture has taught me.. I am grateful for this opportunity and hope that this work inspires more artists and art lovers to think about the impacts of artwork, both in how it is made, and what it can do to raise awareness.
- Romolo Del Deo
