Stephen Cox

Description

When Stephen Cox first arrived in India in 1985 and travelled to the coastal village of Mahabalipuram, which is devoted to the production of traditional Indian temple carving, he was much taken with the fishing boats that were drawn up on the beach, and which, daily, plied a hazardous course in the strong currents of the Indian Ocean. Cox spent several months working with carvers in Mahabalipuram, preparing his own sculpture for the Sixth Indian Triennale, an international exhibition held in New Delhi, at which he won a major prize.

Cox set up his own studio near the sea on the road between Mahabalipuram and Madras, and has supported a small team of assistants there ever since. Continuing to be interested in the forms of the fishing boats, he bought several of them which he kept at his studio with the thought that one day he might be able to use them. Ten years later the image of these vessels has appeared in this sculpture. The granite catamarans are an exact replica of the wooden craft, carved planks that are bound together with cord. The solution Cox found to indicate the wave was achieved through drawing with a computer, and resulted in a grid of vertical columns made to varying heights. Granite from the quarries at nearby Kanchipuram was selected in two different colours, black for the boats and white for the wave.

Placed at the edge of Hat Hill Copse, the sculpture refers not only to the plantation with its even rows of trees, but also to the distant Channel coastline, as from some angles the boats appear to sit upon the watery horizon. The sculpture marked a new phase in Cox's development, in which he appeared to be evolving an interest in sculpture as installation. Recent work has been architectural in scale and influence.