Longing

The importance of the gap is most clearly expressed in the first of the three works of the series "THE MISSING PIECE". This has the title ‘Longing’ and is cut from a 3.6m x 3.6m rectangle of 8cm thick rusty steel plate. The block weighs 7.2 tonnes and has a massive presence. It cannot be wished away. Whoever sees it will know that the person who made it had a serious intent … As Wolf says, ‘It is not a trivial affair.’ One of the forty-nine pieces is missing – a gap in an otherwise perfect order. For the artist this represents an entire world view and a reappraisal of the observations of science. He asserts, ‘The missing piece brings forth a yearning for completeness – every part in Nature is so formed that it finds its rightful place in the whole entity. This is equally true for the very smallest particles such as transmitter cells in the human body, which are so shaped that they can only map on to certain other body cells. That is why I like the beautiful, closed Platonic world view so much. Everything has its place in the order of the cosmos.

In our neo-platonic world of today, God is part of this order even though we cannot prove that he exists. One can only believe in him. All other parts of the whole are known. God is invisible and he is the gap, the Missing Piece. The modern world no longer believes in the closed Platonic order of things. The prevailing view is that the universe is in constant expansion, although scientists have recently postulated that the cosmos is indeed finite. I am not a scientist and am not in a position to judge, yet it is clear that there is a desire within us to be able to feel that we are living in an ordered world.’

These considerations on a closed world view, on a finite cosmos or an expanding one, are reflected in the bounded or non-bounded aspects of the work. The first of the pieces, ‘Longing’, is clearly defined by the closed square.