Bow Wave

Bow Wave was made after Cassell’s residency in Pietrasanta, Italy in 2011. The town is famed for its marble, used by artists for centuries, and remains to this day a thriving centre for sculpture. There, she perfected her knowledge of working with stone with both traditional and mechanical tools.

The red and black lines reveal Cassell’s working process, plotting the patterns’ structure onto the marble’s surface before carving into the stone. As the label for this object in the current exhibition, Halima Cassell: From the Earth at the Watts Gallery (to 18 June 2023) puts it, ‘for Cassell revealing the 3D sculpture from the 2D design is one of the most exciting moments in the process of making. In this sculpture, Cassell breaks up the pure white of the marble with hand drawn markings as if the carved pattern is emerging from her preparatory drawings’.