Bread Mold Piece on Scorched Rock

Peter Hutchinson, artist

born 1930

Bread Mold Piece on Scorched Rock, 1969

Where object was made: England, United Kingdom

Material/technique: rock; bread mold; glass

Dimensions:
Object Height/Width/Depth (Height x Width x Depth): 20.32 x 31.75 x 16.51 cm
Object Height/Width/Depth (Height x Width x Depth): 8 x 12 1/2 x 6 1/2 in

Credit line: The Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services

Accession number: 2009.0051

Not on display

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Exhibition Label:
"NetWorks: Art and Artists from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection," Mar-2011, Susan Earle, Stephen Goddard, and SMA Interns
Peter Hutchinson’s first mold-art pieces, including the work exhibited here, were small-scale models for fantastical landscape projects. As Hutchinson explains, “About this time I was making maquettes of landscapes that, while purporting to be of earthly places, were more truly science fiction, with tubes containing chemical crystals that might exist in oxygenfree environments or airless planetary bodies. They were juxtaposed with tubes containing early life forms such as mold, bacteria, and algae. This represented the contrast between life and non-life, between lively earth and lifeless space.”

An avid gardener, Hutchinson’s conceptual art is also rooted in ecological pragmatism. In simple terms, he writes that his work llustrates “the reuse of decayed matter and recycling it for use by plants - a fact well understood by those with compost heaps.”