When sculpture Works. On the way to the Giardini: Ursula von Rydingsvard

Sculpture is something else. Sculpture relates to your body because you encounter it more directly with your body, in three dimensions, you have to walk up to it and around it, measure yourself against it. You can’t help but sense yourself in it, or not, marking similarities and differences, transmitting tension and flex. It pushes and pulls, gives and takes. It exists in space, just as you do, and you are there with it in a conjoint environment. Like you, it picks up on what’s around it, angle and surface forming its character, its individuality. It has the sense of a single event, as does your arrival, and it has continuity—a run of life in a wider context, as do you.

On the way to the Giardini, I notice a sign for a collateral event on the wall to a garden. New to Venice, I wonder if this is another (perhaps free?) entry to the Giardini and decide I might as well go in. I’m so glad I did, although it didn’t get me to the Giardini. Dense yet translucent in front of me is a sculpture, rising like a compacted fractured composite of off-clear glass (resin), a stratified salt-like pillar, a subtle sway-backed allusion to a woman’s body bearing weight, a mast-like stalactite in inversion. Yes, all those references are there, but what draws me in is the immediate and more abstract impulse to put my body against this, to touch it, and get a more tangible and uncompromising sense of its height, its girth, its form and its surface. I am impressed by the smooth crag of it on my skin and by my imagination of the strength and tenacity of the sculptor and the process that must have been behind it.
But this is just a beginning as I move on to wood, picking up the well-thought relationship with the particular nearby trees in-needle, their barked angles playing with and off the soft splay of the work, the multi-faceted surface breaking into filigree. It’s like a winged pointer, an immediate signpost, a budded junction between a loose ring of six sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard wound together by the more mannered soft grit paths of the Giardino della Marinaressa.
I am taken by the way others engage with the sculptures and the way that they, like me, must have a sense of being tucked into various angles and found in certain apertures. I watch a string of small children literally and instinctually tuck themselves into different parts as if they were made for them, fitting with the work, one before the next. In these works there is a sense of shelter and belonging, but they don’t give themselves up as domestic or gentle, they gesture toward larger contexts and, in this place in Venice, an architecture of repetition offset by the ubiquity of flow.
Sculptural sway opens to the next sculpture’s more variegated form and its opening that slits its curve back to its base, making a join. And then, a more stalwart and dramatic sculpture in front of nearby buildings stands in bronze as if folded in and aspiring to the foliage and cumulus with the delicate pattern of its rim. While it brings to mind the lagoon island Burano’s lace and needlework, constructed over time as a craft, with each stitch binding together a community that’s struggled to keep this practice alive, it also seems to atomise, break apart, and continue elsewhere. Then it comes down in wood as the next sculpture rises and cascades in folds just held by its ragged jutting top, while the next compresses and truncates. More stump-like, it leads me around again for another measure.

Ursula von Rydingsvard's sculptures in the Giardino della Marinaressa, an evento collaterali of the Venice Biennale (photos by Jodie Dalgleish)