Adam —
by Martin Cooney

Description:

No other of my Hand Carved Marble Bowls exemplifies the fundamentally radical nature of Curvilinear Reductionist Sculpture better, or with more drama, than Adam. But what makes this bowl all the more remarkable in my eyes is the fact that, as the name might suggest, Adam was the very first bowl to be carved within The Maiden Collection; 41 individual sculptures split and carved from a single 10 ton slab of Colorado Yule Marble. While it difficult to exaggerate his luminescent qualities the story of Adam’s creation is not quite so simple: I did not simply stumble across the methods and techniques used in his carving straight from the outset. I actually carved Adam, set him aside, and had thought he was quite finished and done with, but as I continued to carve the marble walls of my succeeding bowls ever thinner he began to look quite chunky in comparison, and so I did what I never normally do and set him back on the banker in my workshop and gave him a trim! The bowl you see now is the result of shedding every millimeter of excess bulk to produce a bowl that positively erupts into a fantasy of light when placed in direct sunlight, and infuses an almost other worldly glow when placed amidst the soft candlelight of a romantic dinner table. Having witnessed this stark and quite frankly amazing transformation I immediately set about freeing his partner ‘Eve’ from her mantel of marble and she too now basks in the warm luminiferous radiance of her 35 million year old marble walls. It is possible that there are other bowls somewhere on the planet that match or even exceed Adam’s revolutionary qualities but if so I have yet to set eyes on them. As a matter of fact, when I set about the carving process I myself didn’t even know it was possible to carve the walls of a marble bowl so thinly – it was all new to me, but on realizing just what was actually possible utilizing the modern tools and equipment available to the stone sculptors of today I went on ‘pushing the envelope’ and entered an entire new arena of carving I have come to know and love as ‘Curvilinear Reductionist’… all entirely due to Adam! As with all my Hand Carved Marble Bowls Adam has his Serial Number (120102), along with my Mark, engraved on the underside his base.