Maron

Marron

Stephanie Burns
1994
Bronze, polychrome patina
Unique
45.7 × 16.5 × 20.3 cm
Cast and patinated by Ken Cook

My first encounter with marron was when I was about seven years old in Western Australia, although we called them gidgies then. I remember my mother’s double concrete laundry troughs being full of them, crawling over one another. These were the same troughs where she scrubbed clothes using an old glass and wooden washboard before putting them into a washing machine with a wringer at the top.

The sight of these strange, armoured creatures occupying such an ordinary domestic space stayed with me.

Years later, when we had a farm, I encountered marron again around Pemberton in the south west of Western Australia, where they grew to a much larger size. I became fascinated by their segmented bodies, articulated legs, antennae and enormous claws, but particularly by their extraordinary colour.

When Ken Cook cast Marron, I painted the plaster to show him the colours I wanted in the patina. Ken found the colouring difficult to believe, so I had to send him a photograph of a live, uncooked marron. Crustaceans are commonly seen after cooking, when they have turned red, whereas living marron can carry remarkable greens and blues across their shells.

Marron is also connected to my larger bronze still life Dinner with Trimalchio (1994). The marron form is one of the individual sculptural elements from which that work was assembled, with a red patinated cast appearing within the composition.

The idea of allowing a sculptural element to have another existence came partly from Auguste Rodin. I was interested in Rodin’s practice of reusing and recombining forms, allowing figures or fragments conceived within one work to reappear within another or to exist independently.

I adopted a similar approach with a number of the objects surrounding Dinner with Trimalchio. Marron is catalogued as a unique independent bronze, while the same sculptural form was also cast for inclusion within the larger work.

Exhibition history

1994
Coventry Gallery
Sydney, NSW, Australia

2018
Elysium Verto: Paradise is Changing
Los Angeles, California, USA

Related work

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

References

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

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