There are many socially-acceptable things you can do with a rock. You can build a castle¹ , skip a pebble over sea-foam, or lay on a slab of marble, if you’re dead. Outside, try kicking a stone. British poet Samuel Johnson’s oft-repeated phrase kicking the stone is used to refer to something which is material, and thus, real.² Renata Haar has developed an artistic practice from performing encounters with stones, the material, the real. Engraving, pressing, and splattering with fingers and palms. How does one touch a rock intimately? Is it possible to trespass personal boundaries with a rock? Can engagement between two natural forms ever be unnatural? The scratch of fingernails against granite. The poetry of sketching on marble. The devotion of nature’s provision. To quote another British wordsmith (Charli XCX): everything is romantic.

Haar has produced a new body of sculptural work which transposes her two-dimensional drawing techniques into the third (and fourth) dimension. Pencil has a legibility on paper akin to a neon sign at night. But on rocks, pencil sinks and bleeds into its all-consuming material landscape. Drawings pre-exist on rock as organic shapes and lines, which give texture to its surface. Oh, the phenomenon of nature’s esoteric motifs: spirals, arrows, perfect circles. Haar identifies these readymade artworks and enhances them with her own interventions. Does she follow the rock’s natural lines, or veer away from them? This is a certain narrative and storytelling component to her work, formally materialised. She scrapes the surface, there is no rape of it. Respect the mystery of a rock’s interior, respect the silent inwardness of a rock’s interiority. Not manmade, but womanmade.

What does a collaboration look like between a warm, soft body and cold, hard granite? It looks like Haar’s deep groves, which create space for colour through more entry of light. Deep groves, as if made by a formerly-divine angel fallen (splat) onto earth. Deep groves, as if marked when the stone was still primordial and unformed. Deep groves, a language understood by ancestors. Natural interlocking calcite crystals of marble made shinier… Haar’s sculptures experiment with the many possible encounters between body-and-rock. On the surface of a recent sculpture, blurriness and clarity co-exist on white, gloopy marble. On one side, the material is blurred, and on the other, it is sharpened. Which mark was made by the active support of marble, and which by Haar? The distinction is imperceptible, because of how intimately Haar observes her material, a looking akin to Marcel Duchamp’s inframince or James Lee Byars’ minimalist seeing.

By transforming Brazilian marble—from Espírito Santo—into sculptures, Haar contributes to an organic and local process of landscape formation. Before the marble reaches Haar’s studio, it has already experienced metamorphosis. Marble is a metamorphic rock, composed of the remains of marine organisms. Marble is a mass grave, buried under the pressure over millions of years. Haar’s minimalist intervention comes from her knowledge of the material. There is no Sisyphean quest for perfection in her artwork, because it already exists in the nature of her material. With a strong fragility, Haar melds into pre-existing processes of nature without the human desire for domination. Her spirituality is a means of production, not of representation. This is the spirituality of mystic minimalism, akin to the work of Agnes Martin, rather than, say, a Baroque Catholicism.

Instead of kicking a rock, try hugging a sculpture.

By Dr. Róisín Tapponi

¹ See: Enya.
² The phrase originated as an anecdote involving Samuel Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical
theory of immaterialism by physically kicking a stone.