Darrell Petit is part of Exposed 2011. He lives in Branford, Connecticut.
I believe that stone is alive and that through a tactile and contemplative experience of the Scholar Rocks we come into contact with the core of the earth. Scholar Rocks calls on the restorative power of the natural world. When the Scholar Rocks are integrated with natural scenery they may help visitors interact with the elemental and curative forces of nature. The Scholar Rocks invite visceral interaction and meditation: a visitor moves through the garden as an active participant immersed in the experience of walking, anticipating, viewing, touching.
The Scholar Rocks are influenced by the whimsical baroque stones in Chinese gardens. For Chinese scholars, the stones represent distant natural landscapes and scenes, and they are a way to let the imagination roam freely and travel through memory, space and time.
The Scholar Rocks are some of my most personal works in that they are created without the logistics of my large-scale sculptures, so I am freer physically, and am mindfully immersed in the unconscious process of creating the sculpture. The Scholar Rocks are made from a rare variation of classic Stony Creek granite called Stony Creek “fusion” granite, formed millions of years ago when black biotite fused into an extraordinary inclusion within the crystallized flow structure of the feldspar and quartz matrix.
Darrell Petit works in stone, the most solid and physically resistant medium, but paradoxically seeks to infuse it with movement, spontaneity, a sense of process and a potential for further change. Petit’s sculptures have been included in exhibitions in the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, the Lyman Allyn Museum of Art in Connecticut, and the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Japan. He has received awards from numerous organizations including the Japanese government, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He collaborated with the architects Cesar Pelli and Diana Balmori to integrate his sculpture Contingent into the Chubu Museum, Japan. Petit is currently exhibiting Kiss in “5+5: New Perspectives” at Storm King Art Center in New York.
ABOUT EXPOSED
For the past twenty years, the Helen Day Art Center has hosted an outdoor public art and sculpture exhibition called Exposed in Stowe, Vermont. Exposed hosts sculptures, site-specific installations, and participatory work from twenty-three national and international artists. the 2011 edition offers a series of Thursday night events by 12 video artists, writers, performers, and musicians accompany the exhibit. This exhibition and series of events is accompanied by cell phone audio tours, QR codes, walking tour maps, walkabouts, and a catalogue of the exhibit published by Kasini House Books. The exhibition will take place July 8th to October 8th, 2011.