Space Made Solid
Sculpture is space made solid. It holds sacred a place in the air around it—a place born of vision and occupied by art. A statue not only commands space, it often has empty spaces within the solid. They are not really empty—they have substance; they are as much a part of the whole as the marble itself.
The magnificent "Laocoon and His Sons Attacked by Sea Snakes" might be the high point of Hellenistic baroque style. The Greek sculptors understood that the dramatic open spaces had to be designed to give power to the expression of agony.
Henry Moore, in the mid-20th Century, understood the power of space within his abstracted solid forms. Reduced to the primitive depiction of a person, it doesn't have the artistry and certainly not the emotion of the baroque, but his work has impact with patterns of positive and negative spaces.
Rachel Rotenberg sculpts air by surrounding it with wood. The air has shape and assumes its own identity as the wood joins the dance. The voids among the solids are like the empty spaces between branches of a tree. They give the trees identity and character. They are as essential as the pauses in music or the spaces between words.
We have our own empty spaces. Physically. Intellectually. Spiritually. We might think of them as weaknesses—holes in our fundamental character. But they are not empty if they give form to our strengths. A debilitating trauma can open us to the brightness of what is truly important. It can allow us to reach for the supernatural.