Forma Viva / Božidar Jakac Art Museum

Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia 2023

Forma Viva is certainly an interesting concept of artistic creation. The creativity stimulated by symposium creation, defined by time and local resources, encourages a wide range of ideas, working potentials and creative experiences. My reason for participating in the symposium was primarily to reflect on Forma Viva as a whole. Looking at the multitude of artistic solutions by different artists that are scattered around the surrounding parks and fields is a kind of overview of the social record through time and space. To materialise the reflection, critique and contemporary articulation of wooden sculpture seemed reason enough. Hopefully, Shell will bring a continuity of change in this historical record of artistic interventions.

Shell has been a tree from the beginning and will remain a tree. I am not interested in how to reshape and transform it into a new, unrecognisable form with the artist’s signature. The aesthetics of the natural is a complex ideal. I am interested in the interiority of substance, its duration and its passing. That is why I halved, hollowed out and filled this large log, the remnant of an even larger tree, with artificial material. A material that is becoming the bond of civilisation – concrete. In this way, its interior is permanent, and the shell of the tree is left to time and the forces of nature. The decay and absence of the wooden shell brought about by nature will reveal the artificial core, the construct of the tree’s memory and the anthropogenic nature of conservation.

More about Forma Viva on: Božidar Jakac Art Museum