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DREADNOUGHT, PROBLEMS OF HISTORY 1990-2004 Imperial Porphyry In the 1980s I spent much time living and working in Italy during which I used Vasari’s On Technique – the preface to his Lives – as an itinerary and introduction to the principal quarries used by Renaissance artists. I visited these quarries and made sculptures with their stones. Vasari’s list also included imperial porphyry whose origin was long-forgotten and unkown to him; it remained to be rediscovered by a nineteenth century English traveller in the mountains of eastern Egypt. This stone, prized by the Romans and reserved for imperial use, was valued for its rarity, beauty and extreme intractability. In 1989 I was commissioned to produce a sculpture for the new Opera House in Cairo as a gift from the British Government. I saw this as the opportunity to realise my ambition to work with porphyry and arranged an expedition to the ancient quarries of Mons Porphyrites. Subsequently my sculptures made in the Red Sea town of Hurghada became the first works since antiquity to be made from the source. Dreadnought is an acknowledgement of the history of this extraordinary purple stone, the hardest known. This piece has been in progress for fifteen years, but in many ways it is much older as a collaboration between myself and the unknown Roman quarryman who started preparing the three-ton lump some fifteen hundred years ago. In the manner of a quest Dreadnought represents an ordeal suffered historically to access the blood-purple stone. Continuing the task of hewing out the hard grey matter embedded in the block, leaving behind strange cavities, is a way or purifying and enhancing the stone. Crysalis in the Tate Gallery is a finished work of similar proportion and references mummification and rebirth. © Stephen Cox 2006
