Marion Borgelt

Marion Borgelt Chloé Wolifson

Coming out of the landscape / Belonging to the landscape: Marion Borgelt’s Living Spiral: Variation No. 1 2021

Between the hours in which a fern frond unfurls and the millions of years over which a layer of rock is formed, time in the natural world is marked by cycles and repetition. Living Spiral: Variation No. 1 2021 continues Marion Borgelt’s investigation of sculptural expressions involving separate pieces brought together using the spiral motif.

Living Spiral is a work of elemental balance and contrast. The rock itself exhibits both rough and smooth qualities, with its chipped, exfoliated body and polished flat lip. Its stone forms are complete, while the plants emerging from them grow and change. Granite is hard and unyielding; foliage is frilly and unruly. The growing greenery has the potential to disrupt the formal aesthetics of the spheres’ arrangement.

Living Spiral is also an exercise in possibilities, as the subtitle Variation No. 1 suggests. The logarithmic spiral arrangement of 16 components, used previously by the artist, is resolved while simultaneously suggesting infinite scalability. The work asserts itself on the polished floor of the gallery but has been conceived for outdoor display. Borgelt’s original vision was of a much larger Living Spiral resting on the mound of a hill, with the potential for its boulder-like forms to gradually become subsumed into the landscape. In contrast, many of the artist’s sculptures, while exploring similar forms and themes, employ delicate materials requiring an indoor setting. While Living Spiral seems to appear fully formed, a logical synthesis of nature and the human hand, every element is the result of experimentation and testing of materials and methods. Borgelt is not wedded to a particular medium, instead preferring to be responsive to context. When viewed in this arrangement, stone and frond can imply a multitude of possibilities, animal, vegetable and mineral. Spirals, with their suggestions of growth and evolution, occur in subtle and striking ways in the natural world, from a mollusc’s shell to the arms of a galaxy.

For Borgelt, this intersection of mathematics and nature is fertile ground. The origin of things is of endless interest, kindled during the artist’s country upbringing spent gazing across wide vistas, an experience which also equips her to consider scale in the broader environment. This formative time intersected with the growth of the land art movement of the 1960s and 70s, and while Borgelt has developed a distinct visual language, the influence of that period of art history is clear in works like Living Spiral.

Borgelt’s Living Spiral channels the viewer’s primal understanding of a naturally occurring inner logic. Inside the gallery the unruly foliage is a literal breath of fresh air, caressing our biological impulses with its vibrant green tendrils. Set outdoors, as Borgelt intends and imagines it, the geometry of the arrangement of granite spheres would appear in contrast to its surroundings, before gradually becoming subsumed back into the earth. This spiral is scaled in relation to the human body, yet proposes a continuum of extremes extending into galaxies in one direction, and cells in another.

Marion Borgelt Living Spiral Variation No. 1 2021