El Hacedor mixed media on wood 140 x 100cm
El Hacedor (The Maker), is a collection of poems and short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. The original Spanish title refers to the Scots word makar. The collection reflects on the limitations of creativity. For example in A Yellow Rose the poet Giambattista Marino experiences a mystical revelation on his deathbed.
“Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realised that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.
Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well”.
Robert Brendel founded the R. Brendel company in Breslau in 1866 producing botanical models. These models are enlargements of plants and flowers made of papier mâché, wood, plaster and gelatin. It is possible to dismantle and reassemble the pieces. A didactic revelation, these objects were originally designed to explain the complex structures of nature. Over time they have lost their pedagogical function but can now be viewed from a different perspective and appreciated for their sculptural delicacy and surreal beauty, as objects from a world that is infinitely stranger than we ever dreamed.
Left: Calluna vulgaris (L.) Scottish heather
Right: Euphorbia cyparissias (L.) Cypress spurge
IAN HOWARD 