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

Accession number: 2009.0051

Not on display

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Label texts

Empire of Things

Peter Hutchinson often creates small-scale models of fantastic landscapes with odd materials. He shapes this landscape with scorched rocks and puts bread mold inside glass tubes. Together they create a landscape in which life and non-life coexist.

Cabinet of Curiosities

Empire of Things

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.”