Range Mountain Sculpture
Alongside our design work, over the past decade we have returned to our roots as sculptors with a body of work called Range. This work takes our explorations of the natural world away from our previous abstractions, into the realm of a mannered type of realism.
Propellor partner Nik Rust had a cousin, a renowned Canadian landscape painter, who also made small life-like mountains. Nik was given one of these as a child. When he brought it to the studio one day, we were intrigued and immediately began to conceive work inspired by it. We started experimenting with gypsum and basalt, hammering stone, scraping with wire brushes and smoothing with sponges. Soon we were making mountains, playing with their scale and extending them into ranges. They were beautiful and their small scale had an uncanny quality that made them intriguing. This began a continuing body of work the we call Range.
In 2010 the first piece in the Range series was exhibited in a show at the Toronto International Design Festival. In 2011 we were invited by New York’s Museum of Arts and Design to create a piece for their show Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities. Otherworldly subsequently traveled to France and was shown at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing. In 2015 Range was exhibited at Canada House in London, UK in a retrospective of British Columbian design. More recently, Range has been exhibited in a retrospective of Vancouver design at the West Vancouver Museum and traveled to galleries in Toronto and New York.