DeCordova Ball, 1998
Lars-Erik Fisk
born 1970, Lebanon, NH
works in Burlington, VT
DeCordova Ball, 1998, brick, mortar, slate, copper, 8' in diameter, Collection of John Paluska and Cynthia Brown, Site-specific installation.
The DeCordova Ball was created by Lars-Erik Fisk specifically for DeCordova's 1999 exhibition On the Ball: The Sphere in Contemporary Sculpture. The DeCordova Ball is one in a series of outdoor spheres created by Fisk. The artist sees the sphere as a "simple, seamless form expressing movement and the concept of endlessness and timelessness without a beginning, without an ending." The DeCordova Ball abstracts and complements the architecture of the Museum through the sculpture's red brick exterior, arched window form, and slate turret. The structure of the ball is comprised of a steel support skeleton which was filled with concrete and then coated in wet clay. Once dry, the clay was layered with bricks that were individually custom-cast by the artist. Situated on the slope adjacent to the Museum stairway, the DeCordova Ball may be viewed from various perspectives and interacts with both the interior and the exterior of the Museum building.
Lars-Erik Fisk
born 1970, Lebanon, NH
works in Burlington, VT
Street Ball, 1996, concrete, traffic paint, 40" in diameter, Gift of the Artist, 2002 Rappaport Family Foundation Award
Lars-Erik Fisk is interested in spheres. More specifically, he is interested in the process of transforming things into spheres and by doing so revealing and capturing their essence. For him, the sphere is a "standardized uniform" and a form that is "universally understood." Beginning in 1995, Fisk has worked many familiar and common objects into spheres. A tree, a tractor, a school bus, a rooftop, and even the DeCordova Museum itself have all become subjects for his art. (The DeCordova Ball is one in a series of outdoor spheres and is located on the slope adjacent to the Museum stairway.)
Located on a platform at the bottom of the Museum parking lot is the aptly named Street Ball, a work from the artist's first explorations into the sphere. Made of concrete but resembling asphalt and adorned with the roadway's hallmark solid white and dotted yellow lines, Street Ball is immediately recognizable and yet utterly odd. Fisk has taken the road, a linear planar thing, and transformed it into its least likely form, a sphere. The artist writes, "In combining the dissimilar, I want to find how we might identify something by seeing it for what it is not…" Even in its compacted and altered form the "street" still retains elements of its integrity and identity. In this way the artist is reaching the essence of the thing. The asymmetric arrangement of the work is another important feature to notice. A sphere has an unlimited number of ways that it can rest on a single point; yet, Fisk chose this specific diagonal orientation. By painting the road lines off center, the work is more dynamic and engaging. The appeal of the leaning sphere grabs our attention as if it were almost about to roll away.
