La Vita Nuova

1992
Bronze
Edition of 6
41 × 21 × 28 cm
Signed: McDonald

La Vita Nuova marks an important turning point in my sculpture.

Made in 1992, it was one of the first works in which I moved away from the more academic figurative sculpture and portraiture of my earlier practice towards the still life sculptures that occupied me throughout the 1990s.

A small chair supports a vessel and an egg, while a pear rests against one of its legs. These familiar domestic objects form a quiet, deliberately precarious arrangement. The chair is both furniture and structure, while the vessel, egg and fruit bring with them associations of nourishment, fertility, fragility and renewal.

The title comes from Dante’s La Vita Nuova — The New Life — a work concerned with love, transformation and spiritual renewal. The title was never intended as a literal illustration of Dante. Rather, it points towards the emotional and symbolic territory of the sculpture.

Writing about the work in the catalogue for my 1996 exhibition at Christine Abrahams Gallery, John McDonald described La Vita Nuova as a significant breakthrough in my work, marking the transition from small figures and portrait busts towards still life sculpture with increasingly symbolic and metaphysical associations.

The sculpture also established several ideas that would recur throughout my work: the transformation of ordinary objects through modelling, the use of still life as a three dimensional language, and an interest in objects that carry meanings beyond their everyday function.

The individual elements were modelled by hand before being cast in bronze. Colour is integral to the work: the dark green chair, pale vessel, white egg, golden pear and green leaf create a composition in which patina functions almost as paint.

Exhibition history

1993
Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath, presented at the Olympia Art Fair, London

La Vita Nuova was exhibited with Beaux Arts Gallery at the Olympia Art Fair in London. The work belongs to the period in which my sculpture was moving away from portraiture and figure studies towards increasingly symbolic still life compositions.

1994
Solo exhibition, Coventry Gallery, Sydney, Australia

La Vita Nuova was subsequently exhibited in my solo exhibition at Coventry Gallery in Sydney, placing this early transitional work within the group of sculptures through which my still life practice developed during the first half of the 1990s.

Literature

John McDonald, “Stephanie Burns: Recent Sculpture,” catalogue essay for Stephanie Burns (McDonald), Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 1996.

McDonald identifies La Vita Nuova as a significant transitional work in the development of the artist’s sculpture, marking the movement from an academic figurative language towards the still life works of the 1990s.