Lara Saget 的雕塑：探寻远古、炼金术与神性

On the way to Lara Saget’s Brooklyn studio, I see a headstone shop, where grave markers are displayed in the window. On the next block, there’s a warehouse, its open garage doors revealing floor-to-ceiling stacks of granite and marble slabs. And inside, her studio is a bit of a quarry itself.

“This is my rock room,” the 37-year-old sculptor says, gesturing to a corner of her studio that looks like a construction site. “This is where I collect all my different little things.” She points to a pile of gray stone, explaining that it is rare Tuckahoe marble, which was used to build the Washington Square arch. When Saget saw that a hotel was set to be built on a former Tuckahoe marble quarry in Westchester County, she called the owner and asked if she could come collect some.

This practice of seeing the sublime in nature is at the heart of Saget’s practice: She sees the divine in granite, the sacred in destruction that makes way for creation. These are themes she mines in her first New York City solo exhibition, “and the world came apart,” curated by Sarah Darro, which opened at Trotter&Sholer on November 7. Saget is exhibiting the work after recently receiving her master’s in divinity from the Center for Religion and Advanced Spiritual Studies and becoming an ordained minister. This spirituality deeply informs the work, which is about regeneration, the ancient, and the alchemical.

The show, which variously brings to mind the celestial sculptures of Lee Bontecou and the arresting imagery of Louise Bourgeois, has two components: wall works made from copper alloy, granite, and black marble that borrow the aesthetics of early cave drawings to depict volcanic maps and tectonic plates; and glass sculptures centered on the ancient Judean date palm, a once-extinct tree scientists were able to regenerate from nearly 2,000-year-old seeds, and the Joshua Tree, which is threatened by climate change.

Saget has a broader interest in legacy and inheritance. As the daughter of the late actor Bob Saget, she inherited not just a famous last name, but also the example from an early age of what it looks like to be an artist. Now, almost five years after his death, a documentary about him is in the works. “He was a true artist,” she says. “He was like jazz, just like this constant creation. Being surrounded by that has made it seem very normal to be constantly creating.”

In 2019, she traveled to India for the first time, spending a month in a small village at Art Ichol, a residency for artists working in bronze and stone. Saget has gone back almost every year since to make her work, which involves a 6,000-year-old process called “lost-wax casting.” She works with a team to carve into stone and use wax to make a print of its surface. She then builds a mold around the wax and stone, and constructs a kind of sweat lodge out of bricks and mud to steam out the wax, leaving a cavity for molten metal to be poured in. Every step of the process is manual.

Saget has had a lifelong interest in spirituality, but it wasn’t until the last decade, when she found the Path of Soul Transcendence, that she began to pursue it more seriously. “Honestly, my whole life, I was looking for something,” she says. “The experience of the path is really surrendering to the spirit that I am, that everybody is, and the reality that everything is one.”

It’s an idea essential to her practice, which is rooted in how materials interact with each other. “I just had the sense that when heat breaks everything down, it's all ultimately one,” Saget says. “The center of the earth, or how volcanoes are also obsidian rock, and how all these materials are basically everything. It seems like it’s totally separate, but when it's heated, it reveals it's not.”

Saget’s wall works take a bird’s-eye view, using a tiled-grid modularity that evokes sites of excavation and discovery. The Last One Million Years (2026), for example, is a map of volcanoes and tectonic plates she charted using a celestial map from NASA. The raised rock parts of the maps are from heat-trapping granite in the metal, a spontaneous interaction. The effect is a kind of spiritual archaeology, wherein Saget uses the earth’s most ancient, essential materials to tap into its profundities.

If the wall works are the story of the last million years, Saget’s tree sculptures are the story of the present and future. She started making glass tree sculptures in 2016, focusing on trees that have survived against all odds. She began sculpting Joshua trees during the pandemic, when she drove across the country to Yucca Valley Material Lab in Joshua Tree for a residency. While she was there, it snowed—a rare occurrence—which made her think about how the Joshua tree survived the Ice Age. Similarly, the sculpture Rebirth of an Ancient Palm is a recreation of the ancient Judean date palm, which was brought back to life from extinction. Both sculptures feature textural, kiln-cast glass using the lost-wax process. For the exhibition, she had two children narrate an audio piece, each acting as one of the trees and encouraging people to take care of them. “Nobody could imagine that these trees could survive all of this,” she says. “It’s really about the underlying life force that continues against all cognitive understanding.”

Indeed, she’s begun to think about grief in similar terms. “Working through what seemed to be finite, and allowing what seemed finite to almost reveal itself as infinite has helped a lot,” Saget says. “Because I realized that nothing is the end of anything. It’s always in the process of becoming.”

“and the world came apart,” runs through December 19 at Trotter&Sholer at 90 Elizabeth Street in New York City.