Lemon

Lemon

Stephanie Burns
1996
Bronze, polychrome patina
Edition of 6
21.6 × 8.9 × 11.4 cm
Cast and patinated by Ken Cook

Lemon grew from two quite different sources: the abundance of the Western Australian gardens of my childhood and my longstanding interest in Dutch still life painting.

Growing up in Perth, the lemon tree was an ordinary part of suburban life. It seemed that every backyard had two things: a lemon tree and a Hills Hoist. The lemons I remembered were large, heavy fruit with a particularly thick white pith.

When I began making Lemon in England, I couldn’t find one like those childhood lemons. I searched everywhere, even going to Harrods Food Hall looking for an unusually large specimen. Eventually I asked my grandmother in Perth to send me a lemon from the tree in her garden.

It was the thick pith I was looking for. Cutting the fruit open exposed this substantial white layer between the yellow skin and the flesh, and I made that internal structure visible in the sculpture.

The lemon also belongs to the language of Dutch still life painting that informed much of my sculpture during this period. In those paintings fruit is rarely simply food. Peeled and cut lemons appear among silver, glass, oysters and other objects of abundance, their curling skins and exposed flesh becoming part of the theatre of the still life.

Lemon subsequently became one of the individual sculptural components of Dinner with Trimalchio. As with Marron, I was interested in Auguste Rodin’s practice of reusing sculptural elements, allowing a form to exist independently and also to become part of a larger composition.

Colour was equally important. I wanted the lemon to be unmistakably yellow, although achieving such colours in bronze was technically demanding. As I recalled in Ken Cook: Out of the Workshop, when I told Ken that I wanted the lemon to be really yellow, despite never having seen him produce a yellow patina, his response was characteristically practical: “No matter… we’ll sort something out.”

The resulting sculpture deliberately plays against expectations of bronze. A material associated with dark, monochromatic monuments becomes yellow fruit, green leaves and brilliant white pith.

Exhibition history

1996
Recent Sculpture
Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

2018
Elysium Verto: Paradise is Changing
Los Angeles, California, USA
Edition 4/6 exhibited. 

2022
Ken Cook: Out of the Workshop
Pangolin London, London, UK
Edition 6/6 exhibited. 

Related work

Dinner with Trimalchio, 1994
Bronze
67 × 81 × 86 cm
Edition of 6 intended; one complete example cast

Lemon is one of the independently conceived and cast components used within the larger still life.

References

John McDonald, Stephanie Burns: Recent Sculpture, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 1996.

Ken Cook: Out of the Workshop, Pangolin London, London, 2022.