Warts and All 34

Weighing a good five tons, the granite sculpture ”Warts and All” by British sculptor Peter Randall-Page gives the impression through its form and surface structure of being a giant, ripe exotic fruit that has just fallen from the tree. It forms part of an impressive series of works centred around the sculptor’s preoccupation with natural patterns of growth – for example in the arrangement of leaves and fruit in a plant (phyllotaxis) – and with the dynamic relationship between geometric order and random change in nature. Thousands of small raised nodes form the ”skin” of the apparently organic stone fruit. Like the seeds of the sunflower they are arranged in a spiral system relating to the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Proportion in mathematics. Randall-Page has adapted this structure to the mathematically chaotic form of the granite boulder, naturally eroded over millions of years, in order thus to mirror the balance in nature between order and chaos.