2 weeks Ago By Gabriella Coslovich
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size I’m in Newtown, in Sydney’s inner west, in a semi-industrial backstreet that snakes along a railway line.
The street bears the signs of gentrification: an old silo converted into swanky apartments; a former flour mill now a colony of commercial offices and studios; a cafe that bakes extravagantly large, rich, gourmet cookies that sell for $7.50 a pop. A little further along, huge slabs of marble are stacked in a garage driveway.
One might assume the place is a workshop for the production of upmarket kitchen benchtops. Look inside and it becomes clear that something else is going on. Scattered among assorted wooden crates are life-size replicas of everyday objects, carved in marble, among them a Monobloc chair, a puffer jacket, a short-drop toilet.
Alex Seton, contemporary artist and marble sculptor, emerges from the back of the workshop and greets me warmly. A voluble character with a striking plume of hair, he launches into an explanation about the space. “No carpets and couches,” he says.
“Everything around this studio is based on flexibility and ease ...
everything is moveable, it changes all the time, this is a morphing studio.” It needs to be. In this studio, Seton has made works ranging in size from a three-metre-high skull (including plinth) that weighed 9.
1 tonnes to tiny delicate carvings, such as the life-like yabby emerging from a smooth piece of cream-coloured marble on a nearby bench. The crustacean looks good enough to eat and is, in fact, inspired by a yabby Seton did eat, fished from the dam at his family’s bush property near the Wombeyan Caves, south-west of Sydney. In gratitude for the meal the little creature provided, Seton was stirred to make a memorial to it in marble.
It’s a gorgeous thing with an otherworldly translucence. Nearby, on a timber pallet, sits another reference to the family’s bush property, with a white marble seat and green marble base. “This is the short-drop sawdust toilet my family still has in use to this day,” Seton says, “and they think I’m crazy because I’ve reproduced it in Wombeyan marble and in Pilbara green, a very decadent fancy version of the same thing.
” The family’s bush property, called Greenhood after the local native orchid that flowers in early spring, is where Seton’s love of marble was piqued, as there’s a marble quarry nearby. “We had very interesting parents, they raised us off-grid,” says Seton, the second-oldest of four boys. The family still gathers regularly at Greenhood, although Seton’s parents now live in Sydney.
“They’re good grandparents to a whole lot of grandchildren,” Seton says. I ask whether any of those children are his. “I don’t have children, I don’t even have a partner any more,” the 47-year-old says without rancour.
From above, left: a marble yabby, modelled on one that Seton fished from the dam – and ate – at the family’s bush property near Wombeyan Caves; Seton’s marble sculpture of the short-drop sawdust toilet at the property. Advertisement It hasn’t been the best of fortnights for Seton. I’m sorry to learn that he’s recently had to contend with the end of a five-year relationship and his father being diagnosed with cancer.
“My life has been turned upside down in the last two weeks,” he concedes. “Yesterday I was like, ‘Are we sure we want to do this interview?’ [Then] I was like, ‘Actually, let’s do it, that’s life.’ And no regrets, it was a beautiful relationship, we ended as friends.
The only regret would be that I would love to have a family, and maybe I still will ...
“But my life is full, and even in a break-up time like this, I still have my art that makes the pain only go so deep. It’s fulfilling in a different way ..
. it’s a beautiful thing that sustains you. It’s a joy walking into the studio, surrounded by the objects of my practice.
” ‘I don’t think people really understand how physical it is, how much labour goes into it.’ Alex Seton It is a joy; the studio brims with potential. So much catches the eye – the small blocks of marble with legs protruding; a few scale models of men in hoodies.
Seton has worked here for 15 years, an almost unheard-of tenure given the tendency of artists’ spaces to come under pressure from developers. The flour mill up the road was once a hive of artists’ studios, where Seton himself worked after graduating from Sydney’s College of Fine Arts (now UNSW Art & Design). The silo also hummed with artists once.
“I’m the last artist in the street,” Seton says. Loading But gentrification has caught up with him, too. His studio is about to be redeveloped, and he needs to be out by April next year.
Seton is making the best of it – “time for a change”, he says. It doesn’t take long to work out he’s a glass-half-full kind of person. Advertisement The change he has in mind is no less than a move to Italy, to the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta, a centre of carving practice.
He’s had stints there before and in nearby Carrara, famed for marble quarries from which Michelangelo sourced the material for masterpieces such as David , Moses and Pietà . This time, though, Seton plans to stay at Pietrasanta for a couple of years. With potential exhibitions coming up in London and Paris, working in Italy makes sense.
Shipping heavy material across the world is expensive and environmentally unfriendly. “Financially, it’s just not viable,” Seton says. “Much better to go there and make work with local materials.
There are gorgeous materials there, and a focused industry that does it well and efficiently. That’s the intention for the moment; it might change.” Those giant blocks of marble on the street do look hard to budge.
Still, I wonder about the prudence of leaving his precious material out there. “If you can take it, you’re welcome to it,” Seton says, indicating a massive chunk of Queensland marble that weighs 4.5 tonnes.
It’s Chillagoe pearl marble from the traditional lands of the Wakaman people. “That’s the piece that will become the large sculpture for Sydney Contemporary,” he says, referring to the lavish annual art fair , which runs September 5-8, where he will show with his gallery, Sullivan + Strumpf. Seton in the process of carving the giant puffer-jacket sculpture.
Credit: Louie Douvis It’s late June when we meet and over the next few months Seton will transform this enormous block of marble into a giant, bloated puffer jacket about 150 centimetres high, inspired partly by the AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a dazzling white Balenciaga puffer that went viral on social media last year. A garment of dubious environmental credentials, the puffer is a recurring motif in Seton’s work – an emblem of our times so ubiquitous that even digital natives were fooled by the AI-generated image of the Pope in rapper mode. “I love that image because it’s like a clarion call of a moment in time where this could become so commonplace that misinformation and disinformation in the form of imagery is going to be very hard to validate,” Seton says.
The puffer jacket hints at other things, too. “It physically buffers the figure and that buffer zone is really interesting to me,” Seton says. “How much of the world do you want to experience? How much do you want to live in your own bubble? I’m obviously taking the metaphor to its extreme .
.. but I’m having some fun with it as well.
There’s a joy in the physicality of it. You can laugh at the absurdity of an oversized puffer jacket on a figure and say, ‘How silly are we?’ ” He’s also making six smaller puffer jackets, around 30 centimetres high, but it’s the large one that will test him. Seton has never missed a deadline.
Whether the big one is ready in time for Sydney Contemporary will depend on his health and stamina holding up, and life not throwing too many curveballs. “I don’t think people really understand how physical it is, how much labour goes into it. It’s long hours and slow progress, but I like the drama,” he says.
Some of the small puffer-jacket works that will be shown at Sydney Contemporary. Credit: Courtesy of Alex Seton Advertisement Marble is indelibly associated with the grand, the heroic, the highbrow. One thinks of ancient statues of gods, muses and emperors, or the spectacular works of Renaissance and Baroque greats such as Michelangelo and Bernini.
Seton plays with these expectations and uses this ancient material to sculpt mundane objects that reflect on issues such as nationhood, consumerism, refugees, climate change, and the friction between the individual and society. The ordinariness of the objects he sculpts, and the optical illusions he creates – making marble appear as plump as a pillow or as billowing as a flag – invite a renewed appreciation of the stone. The marble itself becomes a feature, with its many variations in colour, markings and crystal formations.
“Marble is mostly calcium carbonate,” Seton explains. “It’s from sea shells and marine life compressed over many millennia through heat and pressure and time, so it’s this beautiful material that sings with former life.” ‘At 16, I looked my father in the eye and said, “I’m going to be an artist.
” He said, “Oh well ...
let me show you how to invoice properly.” ’ Alex Seton Seton is one of only a handful of Australian contemporary artists working with marble – it’s time-consuming, tough and potentially dangerous work to with, and not just because of the use of hammers, chisels and assorted power tools. In July, engineered stone was banned from use in Australia because of the unacceptable risk of silicosis and other lung diseases among workers exposed to silica dust.
Engineered stone has much higher levels of silica than natural stone, and while marble is a natural product, it comes with its own risks – marble dust can irritate the respiratory tract and exposure needs to be minimised. “I’ve been going to lung check-ups since I turned 40,” Seton says. “You hear so many horror stories of stone workers with silicosis.
I’m in this for the long haul and have no intention of harming myself or others.” Lung health has been particularly top of mind lately, after his 72-year-old father was diagnosed with lung cancer. “It’s been caught early and it’s a slower kind, so it’s going to be OK,” Seton says.
I ask whether his father, too, is a marble carver. “No, hardcore smoker, 55 years a smoker,” Seton says, adding with a gentle laugh, “If you’re going to do something, do it well, is what he always said.” At Seton’s studio.
“You hear so many horror stories of stone workers with silicosis,” he says. “I’m in this for the long haul and have no intention of harming myself or others.” Credit: Louie Douvis Speaking of doing things well, some parents resist the idea of their children becoming artists, worried about the sporadic income that comes with the calling.
Did Seton find this? “I had the opposite experience,” he says. “I was determined. I think my parents could tell there was no telling me, and I just did it anyway.
At 16, I looked my father dead in the eye and said, ‘I’m going to be an artist.’ He said, ‘Oh well, that’s to be self-employed, let me show you how to invoice properly.’ Probably the best advice you’ll ever get.
” Advertisement That 16-year-old is now an established middle-aged artist with works in major public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian War Memorial, the HBO Collection in New York and the Danish Royal Art Collection in Copenhagen. Seton’s practice includes photography, video and installation, but it’s his improbably realistic marble sculptures that have most captured the public’s attention. We walk over to Seton’s “dust room”, a sealed-off section in a corner of his workshop reserved for the hard, noisy work of marble sculpting.
A layer of chalky white has settled across the neon-lit space, giving it a ghostly feel; on the floor, with footprints through it, on the reclaimed music speakers hanging from the walls, and on a puffer jacket slumped on a bench, so uniformly covered in fine powder that I need to check whether it’s real or one of Seton’s sculptures. In this dedicated sculpting area, hospital-grade filters provide a constant supply of fresh air through the mask Seton uses while he works – “like a deep sea diver”. He wears the full array of safety gear: ear muffs, capped boots, glasses, gloves and, depending on the tools he’s using, an apron.
“I’ve never injured myself, not in 20 years of carving,” he says. On a bench sits a maquette of the work he’s making for Sydney Contemporary. It, too, is made of Chillagoe pearl and has been roughly hewn by hand, following several drawings pinned to the wall.
They show a jacket with a huge collar that engulfs the wearer’s head. The jacket’s torso is so pumped and dissected it recalls a carapace or medieval body armour or a bulletproof vest. No hands protrude from the jacket’s bulging sleeves.
The title plays on the absurdity of it all: A Person of Substance . Seton’s giant puffer jacketsculpture (above left) is partly inspired by this AI-generated image of Pope Francis (above right). To create the finished work, Seton will haul that massive block of marble out on the street into his dust room, mark it up and begin to carve directly into the stone with handheld tools such as angle grinders and die grinders.
He’ll then go in with hammer and chisel to create detail. The finishing touches will be made with files and small rotary tools. The marble surface will then be polished with waxes and subtle patinas of cosmetic mica powders to give the resulting work a strange, unearthly feel.
Advertisement When he’s done, that 4.5-tonne block of marble will weigh half the amount, but the rubble won’t go to waste. Seton has an arrangement with the Natural Brick Company, which collects his marble debris and uses it to create custom bricks and castings.
While A Person of Substance will be made entirely by hand, with the help of Seton’s assistant of 15 years, Mitchell Ferrie, a heritage stonemason and fellow artist, Seton is not averse to using technology. “I’m not a traditional carver,” he says. “I use modern power tools and diamond carving heads, and I will use milling robots when needed to assist me on the larger outdoor pieces, and always from scans of an original carving by me.
I have the traditional techniques of hammer and chisel in my palette, but I also love using technology. I’m grateful that it allows me not to beat up my body so much. It saves that labour on the big projects.
The vast majority of all my works have been carved by hand. I imagine that’s going to change as I get older.” On the day we meet, Seton has a brace strapped around his left thumb, a sign of the toll working with marble can take.
He assures me it’s not a repetitive strain injury, nor permanent – he’s just come to the end of a busy period and needs to give the joint a rest. Alex Seton never formally trained as a marble sculptor, learning the craft and refining his skills through various streams, including at international sculpture symposiums, and at workshops in Pietrasanta and Carrara. His first encounter with the material was as a child, fossicking for marble pieces by the quarry near the Wombeyan caves.
One day he took his father’s wood chisel to the stone. Keen to safeguard his chisel, Seton’s father bought his son a proper stone chisel and hammer for his eighth birthday. “That’s Wombeyan marble there,” Seton says, indicating a small sculpture of an inflatable palm tree.
The stone has a warm, creamy sheen, and large crystal formations are clearly visible, which Seton tells me is common with local material. “Australian marble tends to vary quite a lot. There’s not the commercial consistency of Bianco Carrara from Italy,” he says.
“We do have marble that is very similar, from Chillagoe, really beautiful stuff, but it never got the commercial momentum that the Italian stuff had.” Brothers Xavier, Alex and Ben. Credit: Courtesy of Alex Seton While there seems an inevitability between his childhood adventures and becoming a marble sculptor, Seton is reticent about drawing too direct a line – “the truth is more complex,” he says.
His older brother Xavier, however, sees a clear connection. Xavier tells me about a stone track he and Alex built at the family’s bush property over a couple of years when they were children. “We moved thousands of bits of stone, as heavy as we could carry, and we’d fit them together into, like, a wall to hold up this path.
The path was only about three feet or four feet wide. We imagined in the future it would be a train track,” Xavier says. “We use it to this day to get to the creek.
But it occurred to me that moving all that stone and fitting all that stone together is probably the genesis of his sculptural journey.” The boys were creative in other ways. Their father insisted they grow up without a television, so they learnt to entertain themselves.
“We’d make a cardboard box, with two rolling pins and computer paper rolls around the rolling pins, and we’d draw cartoons for little movies or little stories, and then we’d narrate them to the family,” Xavier says. “We told stories every night.” Mum Thérèse with Alex and Xavier at the family’s bush property, Greenwood.
The boys built a stone pathway there as kids. Credit: Courtesy of Alex Seton Seton’s childhood was culturally rich. His mother, Thérèse, and her family fled the authoritarian regime of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in the late 1960s.
“She brought with her a whole bunch of beautiful books on the pharaohs and she was only a teenager at the time, but she kept them,” Seton says. His father, Kenneth, of Scottish-English heritage, is a mathematician and an enthusiast of the Renaissance and the Baroque. “He had lots of books on Michelangelo, Bernini, Donatello and there were specifically sculpture books.
I remember being particularly entranced by these. Mum and Dad built a book shed at Wombeyan Caves. They filled it with their favourite things, a shed just for books.
” Interestingly, Seton regards his dad’s love of science fiction as having had the greatest influence of all on his art. Science fiction writers often contemplate the consequences of humanity’s choices, and it’s this idea – what kind of future will our decisions create? – that Seton says permeates his art. “I think it has formed the core of my practice,” he says.
I ask him to suggest a work that might illustrate this and he nominates 2013’s Someone Died Trying to Have a Life Like Mine . The work features 28 individual life jackets , painstakingly sculpted from Wombeyan marble, representing each of the life jackets that washed up on a beach at the Cocos Islands off the northern coast of Western Australia that year. The incident deeply affected Seton , and made him think of his mother’s migration to Australia.
He recalls that as a child, whenever he was behaving like a brat, he’d be told to be thankful that he was living in a peaceful country with no bombs overhead. But as he watched Australia’s border policies toughen, the “children overboard” affair, and the incarceration of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island, he began to wonder where the country was heading. “It is no longer a country of welcome and what does that mean in the years to come?” Seton says.
“What does that mean for the future when you are so unwelcoming or unwilling to help? What does it say about ourselves and who we will become?” This 2013 work of Seton’s was inspired by asylum seekers’ life jackets washed ashore. Credit: Alex Seton_Someone died Seton bristles as he recalls a reviewer wondering why he’d bothered spending all that time carving replica life-jackets in marble when he could have just strewn real life jackets across a gallery floor. “You can’t sweep away a marble life jacket,” Seton says.
“If I did it with actual life jackets, it’s the parody of an idea. Feel my sincerity in this, my empathy for those who were lost at sea and died trying to have the life of privilege that I enjoy ..
. that work consumed my 2013.” The piece had been commissioned by the then director of the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Nick Mitzevich, for the 2014 Adelaide Biennale.
Mitzevich ended up acquiring the work for AGSA, seeing it as a defining moment for the artist and Australian history. Loading “It’s a real breakthrough work for him,” says Mitzevich, now the director of the National Gallery of Australia, “where he brought together his ability to tell stories that are both personal and intimate and stories that are universal. These life jackets became like tombstones for those 28 people that lost their lives.
We didn’t know who they were. All we had were these life jackets that washed up.” Seton’s work caught Mitzevich’s eye some 25 years ago when he was director of Newcastle Art Gallery.
“Alex was part of a new generation of artists that had come out of art school, and they all had something very big to say,” Mitzevich says. “There was Shaun Gladwell, Alex Seton, Ben Quilty, Del Kathryn Barton, this whole new generation of artists that had a very fresh approach, and their work was bold and dynamic, and they themselves were the same. In the late ’90s, coming into the 2000s, there was a sense of energy and boldness about Australian art, and Alex was part of that generation.
” Can art make a difference? Can it affect social and political change, stop wars, save the planet? It’s an age-old question with no simple answer. Seton offers this: “It’s very difficult to change hearts and minds, but for a moment you can give pause.” Art that creates a moment of pause, a space for contemplation, is not to be underestimated, as Seton’s commission for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra shows.
His outdoor sculpture, For Every Drop Shed in Anguish , a group of 18 large marble droplets spread across a tranquil green lawn, was inaugurated in February this year. Seton’s commission for the Australian War Memorial was inaugurated this year. Credit: Mark Pokorny “That day would be the most profound response to anything that we’ve done at the memorial that I’ve personally witnessed,” AWM curator Anthea Gunn tells me.
Her voice begins to waver. “Sorry, I get emotional when I talk about it. A mother of a veteran who died by suicide said to me that .
.. that was the first day she had not felt alone since her son died something like 10 years previously.
” The commission was daunting for Seton, who was unsure how one artwork could possibly hold and acknowledge the suffering of soldiers, the wounded and the dead, and the enduring toll on families, carers and loved ones. Listening to their experiences, he thought of all the blood, sweat and tears in each of their stories. This led him to the idea of the droplet form.
Sculpted in marble, the delicate droplet becomes strong, durable, with the promise of hope and healing. Seton chose Queensland pearl marble for the work because of its warm, almost flesh-like tones, with bands of blood-red iron suggestive of wounds. A sculpted flag for a soldier killed inAfghanistan.
Credit: Per Ericson The AWM also acquired Seton’s work As of today...
which features a sculpted marble flag representing every soldier killed in Afghanistan. The marble flags are concertinaed and tied with a halyard, in the manner of the Australian flag ceremonially presented to those who have lost a loved one in military service. In 2011, when As of today.
.. was first exhibited, at the Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane, it featured 23 marble flags, representing the 23 Australian troops who’d lost their lives in Afghanistan as part of Operation Slipper.
While Australia withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, the casualties continue from physical and psychological wounds. Seton has created 47 of these marble flags. The commission is ongoing.
One of Seton’s closest friends is dissident Chinese-Australian artist Guo Jian, who was among the protesters facing down soldiers at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Jian vividly remembers meeting Seton at a dinner party in 2002, at Seton’s then studio in Marrickville. Jian, who is 61, was drawn to this “young kid” who impressed him with his knowledge, critical thinking and independent mind.
That night, they spoke of the social and political issues of the post 9/11 world. Sensing Seton’s passion, Jian encouraged him to put his ideas into his work. The evening spurred a lasting friendship and every time Jian travels to Sydney from his home on the NSW Central Coast, he and Seton catch up for a drink.
He describes Seton as kind, loyal, dynamic and disciplined. “When we go out for a drink, after three drinks, he says, ‘I have to go, tomorrow I’ve got to work,’ ” Jian says. With dissident artist friend Guo Jian.
Credit: Courtesy of Alex Seton The demands of marble carving require that kind of dedication. Seton heads into the studio from 9am to 5pm every weekday, and at least three nights a week works close to midnight. “I used to do all-nighters at least twice a week,” he says, “[but] I no longer like doing after-midnight runs.
” The corrective to all this studio time is a healthy social life. “I tend to feel I’ve spent my life in the studio, so when I’m out, I’m really out, gallery openings, bars, theatre is my favourite,” Seton says. “Good food is a must, a lot of my friends are the restaurateurs of Enmore and Surry Hills.
” Loading While Seton has been practising as an artist now for 30 years, moving to Italy will take his work in new directions and he’s eager for the challenge. “There are different conversations happening, there is a different response that I get out of European audiences,” Seton says. “The material that I’m engaging with is very much confronting their history, and they’re fascinated with someone making commentary on it from the remove of the Antipodes, in Australia, with a colonial legacy.
” It’s fair to say that Italian society tends towards the conservative and is protective of its cultural heritage. While some contemporary Italian sculptors are toying with those traditions, the tourist market for reproductions of well-known works, such as Michelangelo’s David , remains strong. Seton knows it’s a different mindset he’ll be walking into.
“People say, ‘You can’t treat marble like that’. And I say, ‘Watch me!’ ” To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald , The Age and Brisbane Times ..
