Casting Sculpture in the Landscape

Hazewinkel works in, or better said, with the landscape. His distinctive, in-the-earth, landscape casting practice has ancient processual roots in that sand-casting, now conventionally undertaken in a foundry, has its origins in the landscape. Today, foundry-based sand casting relies upon a universally generic material known as Green Sand. It is produced by combining high quality silica sand with water, bentonite clay and unspecified carbonaceous additives. Green Sand has no individuating character, it exerts no irregular form shaping qualities, it leaves no residue in the cast object, it is behaviourably predictable. All of these characterless, or lifeless, characteristics productively lend themselves to the conventional foundry-based pursuit of producing multiple identical copies, or editions, of the same object. By contrast, Hazewinkel approaches the landscape as an active co-contributor that participates in processes that generate unique-state, location-specific, figural entities, shaped as much by the material qualities and stratigraphies of their place of origin as by his understanding of culturally diverse histories of human figuration.

This group of three small reclining male figures blend and embody the geological, marine, and anthropic temporal registers and residues of their place of origin. Their embodied commingling of temporalities occurs through the presence and agency of the location-specific materialities captured in their surfaces and volumes. Their horizontality brings to mind the state of sleep (itself a commingling of temporal registers) and of dreaming, a kind of limbo state unshackled from the temporal reliablity (or not) of the waking state; but there is also something else present here, the figures summon feelings from a different realm, they elicit a sense of vulnerability, of being exposed, of uninvited examination, of privacy laid bare, and of finally being laid to rest.

^{Photographed by Giorgos Vitsaropoulos}