Your first kiss and news of your grandmothers death: these make rain stand still.

A Stillness of Rain is a 14’ tall steel sculpture — part tree, part architecture which represents the moments of still time when meaning is most powerfully made.  Meaning is the critical substrate of what makes us human and, unlike anything else in the universe, is infinitely compressible into moments of time.  

The artwork’s scale, materials and movement locate viewers as inside the space of the sculpture’s alternative physics. Symbolically the hanging elements are frozen raindrops but also buds of new awareness containing sustained fires — energy for change. The vertical element acts as a tree-trunk and also as a kind of axis mundi connecting the touchable and untouchable; earth and firmament. The complete sculptural form is only revealed as audiences walk among the raindrops, feeling the presence of compressed meaning beside them, below and above.

A Stillness of Rain was created with the help of many talented fabricators and friends. It was selected for and first presented at the May 2024 art event Unscruz as part of a group show of large-scale multimedia sculptures.