A new Sullivan + Strumpf exhibition puts a Tasmanian tuxedo in marble on the market
Australian sculptor Alex Seton challenges traditional practices of sculpture with his work.
When Michelangelo climbed the jagged peaks of Mount Altissimo near the Italian coastal village of Pietrasanta in 1517, the Renaissance master discovered a mountain made entirely of crystalline marble, describing it as being “reminiscent of sugar”.
“There is enough here to extract until Judgment Day,” he wrote home. In the centuries since, artists from Rodin to Miró, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi have followed the well-trodden path to the marble-rich artists’ mecca, known as the “Little Athens of Italy”.
“There is no place that is more venerated for a sculptor,” artist Alex Seton shares.
The Sydney artist recently said goodbye to his inner-city studio and relocated to Pietrasanta, which he has visited repeatedly in the course of his 20-year career as one of Australia’s leading sculptors.
“No place has a legacy like this – where Michelangelo wandered up into the hills and said, ‘Dig here!’. And that quarry survives and thrives to this day.”
Seton is on video call from his apartment on the outskirts of the village. Light filters in through the drawn curtains behind him. It’s 40.C by mid-morning, he tells me, and he is chugging water to stay hydrated. I can hear the birds singing outside his window.
Seton says Pietrasanta has changed over the years. In summer, as Rome and Florence become stiflingly full with tourists, Italian families seek solace in the villages where they have vacationed for generations, Pietransata among them. Prices have soared in recent times and Seton can no longer afford to stay in the centre of town. But he’s not complaining. Wild herbs and flowers grow by the side of the roads that he cycles along every morning en route to his studio, passing hills covered by pine woods and dotted with olive trees. It is hallowed ground; it’s from these hills that some of the world’s greatest treasures have been carved.
“I have just been to a ballet festival inside a small square designed by Michelangelo, attached to the old library,” Seton tells me. “So the performance was actually held within his architecture. There is a long arm of legacy here. It’s a lot. I can see why people get overwhelmed.”
Seton, the second eldest of four boys, grew up on a rural property near Wombeyan Caves, south-west of Sydney. And, it was in the grounds of his childhood home that he first touched the material that would ultimately become his life’s work.
“My parents were quite prescient in a way,” he says. “They saw that in the coming decades, we would all be sitting at a screen and they wanted something real, more tangible. So they raised us off-grid. They believed that communing with nature was more authentic. They drove up and down the coast of New South Wales looking for a property that had a natural waterfall on it. And they found that in Wombeyan Caves.”
Across the way from the Seton family home was a quarry. “There was marble quite literally on the property. I started playing with it at eight years old in the bush. And … I never looked back.”
The trajectory of his career is not quite that linear. Seton studied art history at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts and experimented with a few mediums before returning to the material that captivated him as a child.
“It wasn’t until after art school that I really discovered the joy of marble. I had to figure out where I felt most comfortable and what medium was mine; what kind of thinker I was. There’s always a romantic narrative people want to hear, but the truth is that it was a process of exploration. I eventually discovered sculpture as this incredible medium where all your ideas can exist out in the world as a physical entity for people to interact with.”
Seton works with enormous slabs of marble and his sculptures range in size from a soaring three metres to tiny, detailed figures. But while marble is a material often associated with lofty subjects, Seton turns to the everyday for his subjects. There is an irreverence to his approach, taking the hallowed material of the gods and chiselling it into, say, a two-metre puffer jacket.
“I’ve been obsessed with certain contemporaneous fashion items over the course of my career,” he says. He refers to his 2012 series of hoodies fashioned out of Bianco Carrara marble, which he made in reference to Mark Zuckerberg “wearing a hoodie to seem more egalitarian when he opened Facebook on the stock exchange”. His series The Fabulists, presented by Sullivan+Strumpf this month, is a collection of puffer jackets inspired by 2023’s viral AI-created image of the Pope in an oversized Balenciaga jacket. I have to ask, what is it about the “Tasmanian tuxedo” that so captures his imagination?
“With the puffer jacket, I can lean into all the trompe l’oeil I’ve learned as a sculptor,” he says. “Making something hard appear soft. That image of the Pope was funny, but it was also not so funny that in less than 24 hours, several million people thought it was real. It was one of the first images of mass deception.”
He also maintains that the work has a playful element. “We have these very powerful tools and we’re more enabled than ever to activate our imaginations. This is an extraordinary time we live in.”
This positive approach extends to his practice. Aside from the romance of immersing himself in the historic homeland of his beloved material, there is also a practical aspect to living in Italy. His works are often enormous, and expensive to ship around the world. The pieces on which he’s currently working are headed for Frieze London, and he feels optimistic for his future.
“What started as me playing in the bush ended up as my life’s endeavour. Exploring sculpture is a lifetime’s worth of work. What I’ve loved seeing here in Italy are some of the artists I knew when I was younger only getting better. Sculptors only get better with age, as you finally come to bear on everything you’ve ever learned.”
The Fabulists opens at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney on September 25.
This story is from the September issue of WISH.
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