The astonishing diversity of British sculptor Tony Cragg's work suggests an urge to explore the entire history of form and form-making. His materials include the natural (wood, stone, clay) and the man-made (plastic, metal, glass, plaster, found objects). He has formed works by casting, carving, and constructing, as well as by simply arranging.

His interest in the interaction of nature and culture and the evolution and disintegration of form is evident in both the plaster Generations and the granite-and-steel Ordovician Pore (both 1989). Both sculptures contrast primitive organic forms with highly developed man-made ones. In Generations, crude, sluglike forms, suggestive of primitive animal life and made simply by rolling up sheets of wet plaster, are contrasted to a pair of ovoid disks suggestive of highly polished lenses-the very tools scientists use to observe natural forms through telescopes and microscopes.

While Generations may present the human and natural as opposites, Ordovician Pore hints at man's status as part of nature. The biomorphic forms in this sculpture allude to the fossilized remains of a type of algae that developed in the Ordovician period, which began about 500 million years ago. This algae is believed to have produced oxygen, which allowed for the development of other life forms; but ironically, the oxygen poisoned the algae and killed it. By juxtaposing these forms with a pair of cylindrical shapes reminiscent of nuclear cooling towers, Cragg seems both to suggest both man's self-destruction and the likelihood that new life will develop as a result.
 
 

Ordovician Pore 1989
granite, steel

Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Gift of Joanne and Philip Von Blon, 1989