Steel Runner

The runner is a subject I have been occupied with for a long time. It is not a concentrated interest, though, nor is it the main theme of my work. Even so, after a while I always come back to the running figure. I have never seen the runner as a competitor but rather as a hunter tracking prey at a slow but steady run, as a messenger carrying news, or as a traveller moving quickly through the landscape towards a goal unknown to us. The Steel Runner of 2021 is welded from 10 mm stainless steel sheet. It is 350 cm tall and weighs roughly 2 tonnes. The sculpture was in the making from 2019 but was produced in 2020–2021. Originally it depicted a slender male running figure. I modelled the figure at a small scale in clay, scanned it with a 3D scanner and went on working on it with the tools of digital sculpture. The sculpture gained in volume until the light runner turned into a running figure enclosed in a spacesuit. In traditional sculpture a rapid change of volume is an irreversible and time-consuming procedure. 3D modelling, by contrast, lets you try that step in endless variations for as long as you like. While looking for greater volume I arrived at the form of a spacesuit, and in a time hit by Covid, when everyone was cut off from one another and from their surroundings, I accepted the figure of a runner in a spacesuit. The tools of digital sculpture thus not only moved the idea of the runner on, they also left their imprint on the surface of the sculpture. The process of changing the volume left errors on the figure in the form of bumps. The bumps are where the calculation of the enlarged surface got caught in a loop. I deliberately left these irregularities on the surface, even though it would have been very easy to get rid of them. In the end the runner was given a face and his surface was cut into contour layers. The individual layers were laser-cut from 1 cm thick stainless steel sheet and welded from the inside (the sculpture is hollow) into the final form of the runner. Both the material and the technology are of our time, and at the same time they meet one of the demands I make of a sculpture and that sculptors have made of their works since time immemorial: the ability to withstand time on the scale of centuries and millennia. The surface reflects the changing light around it beautifully. The runner is visually relieved of weight, and in some outdoor settings his solitude makes him look like a runner from Mars. But I leave that to the viewer and stay with the simple title Steel Runner.