20 years on from his seminal ‘Acts of Faith’ exhibition, Harris-based sculptor Steve Dilworth returns to An Lanntair with a major show. Fittingly it will form part of the Faclan Book Festival, which this year is themed on Belief.
Dilworth’s dark, intense works can be hard to categorise, wrought as they often are from the once-living and the never-living. A dead bird will form the kernel of a bronze sarcophagus: An amalgam of core and husk, an extinct seed reborn as the ghost offspring of its former self.
Whether hosting a vial of still water, storm water, the North Wind, seal’s teeth, or “designed to be thrown into an internal landscape” his totemic objects are vehicles, caskets, containers, crucibles for personal mythologies and purposes. They each seem to exert a compelling gravitational force from their hidden centre.