Working mostly with a chainsaw, Robyn Horn crafts a unique balance between movement and space, creating a form that at once seems precarious yet stable.
As with other sculptures of the Slipping Stone series, Approaching Collapse is a single piece of wood carefully carved to appear as a collection of segments.
This tension in form is what excites Horn about sculpting.
In the implication of movement, Horn was most notably inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), which stripped away many of the traditional characteristics of nude painting, instead aiming to expand our perception of the human body in motion.
However, like fellow large-form sculptor, Davis Nash, Horn’s strongest inspirations are her medium and the natural world around her. Both, inescapably tied with time.
For Horn’s sculptures, the seasoned wood requires decades — if not centuries — to mature.
The layered stone formations outside Horn’s home near Arkansas’ Pinnacle Mountain that inspired the Slipping Stone series are estimated to be over 275 million years old.
Horn explores this geologic time by exposing the similarities in texture and layers of the wood and stone.
“[Slipping Stone] has given me my identity as an artist,” says Horn. “The designs keep popping into my head. […] I’ll think about layers of things. How they relate to other layers, and to each other. How they cascade and build up, then lose their footing and start to collapse.”
In Approaching Collapse, Horn discovered her distinctive style, a delicate balance between chaos and order, materiality and nature.
