Thursday Salute to Originals: Mortal Stone
An anatomical rock sculpture study explores themes of mortality and loss.
Grief and loss are deep, weighted emotions. That’s why artist and designer Debra Baxter has chosen heavy stone and rocks as the perfect medium to explore these all-too-human themes in the series Love Tears.
From a blend of alabaster, quartz, wood, and other stones, Baxter crafts fearfully delicate organs and emotional human subjects, invoking the sensation of tightness and mourning in the body while expressing the metaphor of human delicacy.
“There’s inevitable pain in every form of love,” said Baxter in an interview with This is Colossal. “I’m fascinated by the ways in which we decorate this grief and mourning, and I wanted to see how far I could push myself with balancing the immediate, often ornate, demonstration of loss, and my use of permanent materials. This is about loss and legacy.”
This Thursday, we’re saluting the Victorian-inspired Love Tears series and the gravity of human love and loss. The works pictured here will begin showing at the Form & Concept Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 29, 2021. You can view more sculptures like these on Baxter’s Instagram.
Sources: Debra Baxter, This is Colossal