Charlotte Mayer

Description

'Pharus' means fire. When man discovered that he could make fire he never looked back. This singular ability has ever since distinguished him from the animal kingdom, giving him more options for protection, nourishment and development, and enhancing his ability to fight. Such a powerful tool inevitably became the source of legend and myth within civilisations all over the world, and artists have used fire symbolically since the first cave paintings were made. Charlotte Mayer has captured the power, wonder and movement of flames in this sculpture.

Without fire, metals could not be extracted from the earth, nor could the alloy bronze be mixed. In using bronze for her image of fire, Charlotte Mayer acknowledges the importance of materials and processes as well as subject in a sculpture that is partly abstract, partly pictorial. The Aztec god of Fire, Huetmetcotl, had engraved on his headband a pair of interlocking isosceles triangles, one pointing up to symbolise kingship, the other pointing down to represent the Lord of thunder and lightning. Mayer's triangular, upwardly spiralling composition - she frequently uses the spiral as a form in her sculpture - reflects these themes and the associated notions of aspiration and dynamism.

Charlotte Mayer has not often had the opportunity of working on such a scale. As she always makes her own models for casting, she remained determined to do so, even on this monumental scale. She made the flames in sections, carving and texturing them in her studio, before assembling the whole sculpture round a gigantic cone in her London garden. The contrast between the roughness of the flames on the outer surfaces and the smooth inner core provides further aspects to explore in this, Mayer's largest sculpture to date.