The Flood Series is a new group of marble and stainless steel lighting conceived by Kristin Victoria Barron during an artist residency at the Villa Lena in Toiano, Tuscany in 2016. During the residency Barron repeatedly sculpted ceramic forms based on flood dream imagery of fragments deep below the waters surface. In the dream the fragments are obscured by massive flood currents enveloping the entire earth. The fragments were sculpted repeatedly as a way to meditate on the dream images; then final forms were chosen and the rest destroyed. These chosen ceramic forms were brought back to Italy 2 years later in 2018, to be replicated in statuario marble, hand carved by master craftsman in Pietrasanta who have been working in the marble tradition for generations using carving techniques that date back to Pre-Roman times.
The final lighting pieces represent the gathering and reconstruction of these dream fragments, as one would do with the ancient remains of an incomplete skeleton from an archeological dig. The statuario marble from Carrara, lauded after for it’s sensual qualities and pure white coloration, dates back to the seminal art historical sculptures of Michelangelo, and is still quarried from the same mountain face hundreds of years later. In her new works, Barron has chosen to depart from the classic carving tradition and hollow her forms so they can be softly illuminated from the inside. The light passing through the marble forms creates a dual perspective where the exterior forms are expressed in daylight and the interior cavities are expressed when illuminated at night. The duality of the illuminated and non-illuminated states is the visual distillation of an ancient past and an ethereal present.