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Scallop

Made in 10mm stainless steel, Maggi hambling's sculpture to celebrate British composer Benjamin Britten was unveiled on Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk, on 8th November 2003.

Awarded the first Marsh Award for Excellence in public sculpture, November 2005.

Shell

'A Conversation with the Sea'

Maggi Hambling's Scallop is at once a monument to a great musician-composer and a celebration of the origins of his art. It is perfectly appropriate that its forms should resemble those of a sea shell (though it is an image of greater complexity than that suggests) for it is a work that reminds us that music is an aural art (the word monument derives from the Latin for to remind) and we think of the ear as being like a shell. We have all listened to the sound of the sea in a shell. The sculpture then can be seen as an image of listening, and the art of music was born out of listening to the sounds of nature and replying to them, giving voice to the deepest human desire, to create order out of apparent chaos. In this way, as in others, as we shall see, the sculpture refers to the beginnings in nature of all art.

The sounds of the North Sea – wind, wave and bird cry – are unrelenting, unstoppable: on the Suffolk coast they are augmented by the rhythmic crash, wash and drag of its breaking waves on the great shingle shoreline. It is an absolute presence, there for as long as there are ears to hear it. It was a constant reality in Benjamin Britten's life at the place where he lived and worked, created a marvellous festival of music, and in which he set one of his greatest works, Peter Grimes. The 'Sea Interludes' of that opera are among the most beautiful evocations of the sounds of the sea in all music. Art of such a kind is an act of creative attention to the natural world. 'These natural sounds suggest music to us,' wrote Stravinsky, 'but they are not yet themselves music‑….‑They are promises of music; it takes a human being to keep them: a human being who is sensitive to nature's many voices‑…‑but who in addition feels the need of putting them in order‑…‑In his hands all that I have considered as not being music will become music.'

Music is an abstract art, but we cannot help being struck, as we approach the sculpture from shoreward, by the anguished cry from Peter Grimes: 'I hear those voices that will not be drowned'. It is immediately visible, written by light on the rim of the shell. These are words bound to intensify our sense of hearing as they suggest we listen for reverberations of another kind on the marine air – echoes of 'the still sad music of humanity'. We remember at once the essential humanism of Britten's music, its expression of the total range of thought and feeling, its empathetic capacity to celebrate and to commemorate, to praise and to mourn.

Britten knew that it is one of the first purposes of art to find form for our deepest feelings, to sharpen our senses to reality, to increase our humanely imaginative apprehension of the world. Hambling's sculpture, seen from this landward side, rises and splays against the sky like the wings of a bird, a dove or a phoenix, at take-off: an image of vitality, of peace, hope and regeneration. At sunrise and sunset, seen respectively from west and east, it is the great standing shell that dominates our view and becomes a kind of primal marker of the passing days.

When we walk round Scallop to seaward another dynamic is revealed. Here we see in the shining stainless steel of its wave-like forms a silver mirror-image of the breaking waves that sound below them at the sea's shifting tidal edge. There is a turbulence here that answers to the sea's clamour and to its unceasing movement. These forms answer to the sea's soundings in visual complexities that are in exciting contrast to the simple single scallop shape that stands against the seaward sky as we approach from the land. These forms create an echo chamber: the sounds of wind, wave and sea bird are focused at the sculpture's centre. The words of the poet Vernon Watkins come to mind: 'I have been taught the script of the stones, and I know the tongue of the wave.' It is utterance that creates order.

The scallop is a bivalve, its shell grander than those found on Suffolk beaches, but of a kind with those small ones that we may pick up on the shore there, usually found shattered and worn by the pounding of fragile shell against hard pebbles. In this elemental setting of air, water and stone, when we hold such shell fragments in our hand we may see in them visible evidence of the natural tendency in all things to entropy. That which was beautifully individuated, a near-perfect symmetrical fan-like form, like each and every other one a picture of the paradigm shell, is now on a progress to an irreversible reduction to crystalline grains of sand, an ineluctable return to the matrix-sea.

Hambling's shell forms, their steel taking on the colour of sea, sky and shingle, are in parts already split and abraded (the rust at once real and symbolic of this process), and in this the sculpture is an image of a moment of poise between the being of the living animal and the non-being of its mineral residue. Its diagonal angle to the beach, its lean as seen from the side, emphasises this momentary dynamic. In this aspect the sculpture paradoxically symbolises art – all human making – as the cultural expression of the natural impulse in life against entropy and towards differentiation, the energy that realises the uniqueness of form that makes a thing what it is, gives it quiddity and character. (These things 'are promises of music; it takes a human being to keep them ...')

The scallop has, of course, a history in art, myth and human affairs as well as its primal existence in nature. It is the universal emblem of the things of the sea. It is the carrier of Venus to the shore, the vehicle of sea-borne beauty: in this it is a potent female symbol of love. It is also an emblem of pilgrimage, which in this case represents the homage of one artist to another. And it serves to remind all who come to this borough on the North Sea shore not only of a major composer, and of the many musicians and artists he brought here, but of a remarkable native of Aldeburgh, the poet George Crabbe, on whose poem Britten based his opera. The steel shell on the shingle may be said thus to represent a celebratory conjunction of three arts and the craft of the metal founders who fabricated it in this town. A robust and poetic work of art stands at the thrilling edge where culture meets nature. At this point on the Suffolk coast it is a powerfully-charged presence at the place for which it was made, where Britten walked and listened to the voices of the sea.

Mel Gooding

Notes: Maggi Hambling referred to Scallop as 'a conversation with the sea'. Stravinsky is quoted from Poetics of Music (Harvard UP, 1942). The words on the sculpture are not from Crabbe's poem, but from the libretto by Montagu Slater. Vernon Watkins is quoted from his poem 'Taliesin in Gower'.

Mel Gooding is a well-known writer on art and architecture. He is Research Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art.

(Photograph copyright Malcolm Farrow, Suffolk Coastal District Council).

author: iapmag