Zbliżenie

A block of sandstone almost square in plan, split at the centre by a vertical fissure: on either side of the fissure two swollen forms reach towards one another without touching, while around them the stone stays rough, worked with crossed strokes. The photograph catches it still on the wooden trestles of the worksite.

It is made in 1976 at Reinhardtsdorf, among the sandstone mountains of the Elbe, at the sculpture symposium held where the stone is quarried: it is the first of her worksites in East Germany, and in the same stone she will carve, the following year at Hoyerswerda, the first Civilisation. On the left flank she cut the monogram and the year, «AWJ 1976».

In Germany the work is called «Werdendes», that which is coming into being. Exhibited in Berlin in 1978, two years later it was set on the bank of the Spree, in the Treptower Park, where the city guides still point it out: the forming of a living shape inside the hardest material, they say, is its subject. The motif had occupied her before — at the wood sculpture symposium of Hajnówka, in 1973, she shows works gathered under the title «Zbliżenia».