Marc Quinn

Time and again, Marc Quinn has defined himself as an artist of grand statements. Utilizing imagery and materials from his surroundings, often cast on enormous scale; the artist has created a body of work that digs at the complex interrelations of art and science, life and meaning, process and creation. Bermuda Triangle- most recently seen on San Giorgio Maggiore, in tandem with the 55th Venice Biennale – forms part of his Archaeology of Art series in which sculpture takes the form of one of nature’s most enduring and complex phenomena – the shell.

Created over millions of years but without a living consciousness, the spiralling beauty of the shell has inspired Quinn to create a series of works that take this form. His use of colour, texture and scale transforms the image of the shell. No longer an arbitrary natural organism, Quinn states that ‘the form of the shell is like a found structural diagram of how the present becomes the past, with the rings on the outside of the shell suggesting the past and a polished reflective front showing the present’ (My Modern Met, 2013). This relationship between the present and the past is a common thread in much of Quinn’s work. He sees the shell as a sculpture of the space-time continuum that mirrors the random beauty of the universe. In Bermuda Triangle this is represented by the monumental scale of what was originally an abundant and insignificant object.

These bronze sculptures are actually scaled models of real seashells that Quinn has digitally scanned and reproduced. The process begins with the selection of real shells from nature, which are then recorded with a digital 3D scanner. That code is then converted into a digital map and sent to a printer, which produces the shell model to be later cast in bronze. Consequently, Quinn’s shell sculptures are born much in the same way that an organism uses its DNA to reproduce.