You fall in love with a sculpture as you admire its looks and craftsmanship in the cool, calm of the gallery or sculptor’s studio. Then, unexpectedly, you find yourself wondering where the thing will go. Your eye moves from the small, contained space of the gallery (where perhaps a hare or fox is placed alongside a heron) to the much larger, more unpredictable setting at the water’s edge, plinth in the gallery.
Size (or scale, as it is properly called when talking about a relationship between an object – a bronze sculpture, in this instance – and a space) determines whether a sculpture dominates a room or seems to have been misplaced. It’s not simply a question of finding an object the right size for a given space.
A sculpture looks right in its surroundings precisely because of its relationship of proportion to that particular space, not its relationship to some arbitrary, absolute size. A large animal, such as a bronze horse, looks quite smaller in a large garden than a sculpture of the same thing would in a small gallery. Yet the same large animal can overwhelm a garden’s smaller, more contained spaces, such as a courtyard or a plot of lawn around mature trees.
In terms of the viewing distance, how far one stands from the work is as important as the size of the space in which one stands. An artist needs to allow room for a close viewing distance, for modelling that can be seen from a foot or two away, to discern the subtlety of fur or feather or anatomy in a sculpture viewed at close quarters. But a sculptor must also allow for the long viewing distance, that sense of astonishment when, from further away, the contours of the animal and the nuances of its relationship to the space are seen. Too small, and the animal disappears into the lawn or merges with the field. Too large and it inevitably loses much of its subtlety and grace.
Most sculptors and galleries give a great deal of thought to all of this before a new sculpture is delivered to its new home. For Bronze Animal Sculptures, consider www.gillparker.com
If a sculpture’s scale is not rightly considered, then the very best object – a sublime work of art executed with great craftsmanship – fails to find its true place, either because it is too large or too small for its allotted site.
Conversely, when scale is rightly considered, an object becomes more than that – it becomes a pre-ordained fixture in its allotted place.
