lana international SCULPTURE SYMPOSIUM, italy
In 2007 Dan attended was invited to make a new artwork in Lana in the southern Tyrol in northern Italy. The sculpture comprises a portal made from a single block of local granite. The work, titled 'Ur' is now forms part of the South Tyrolean Sculpture Path.
“Michael Dan Archer’s works often move between differing levels of reality. Here, the artist has taken his inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges. In his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” the writer designed a second, imaginary world, beside the world we all know. Archer sides with Borges to open a portal to suggestion. The Scottish artist has cut a right angled passageway out of a nearly natural block of granite and displaced it slightly along the side of the block. A magical door through stone: “Ur”, the threshold between two worlds. In the act of working the stone, Archer has created a relationship between the nature of stone and the work of man. He lends the stone his spirit and opens in it a door to a new world.”
Wolfgang Wohlfahrt
