Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, From Arsenic to Zinc by Hugh Aldersey-williams

Author:Hugh Aldersey-williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, Science, History
ISBN: 9780062078810
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

The profound and contradictory meanings of lead–fortune and fate, creativity and destruction, humour and seriousness, love and death–have led a number of contemporary artists to employ it in their work. Not many are drawn to such an unfashionable and humble material, perhaps, but the few who have been are among the most reputed. The British sculptor Antony Gormley and the German artist Anselm Kiefer, for example, use lead in ways that exploit contrasting aspects of its nature.

Kiefer works with an unusual range of basic, one might say primal, media including ash, chalk, straw and fingernails. Lead, which is regarded in alchemical and Cabalistic thought as primordial matter, has been important for Kiefer for more than thirty years, chosen for practical reasons of workability–it is one of the most malleable of metals–but also, more importantly, for its multiple cultural echoes. It is, he says, ‘a material for ideas’.

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