Deco Dune Ripple wall sculpture
When a wave becomes a piece of geometry
Deco Dune Ripple does not pretend to be a naturalistic cast of a real dune. It takes the ripple — the same wind-carved wave shape that appears elsewhere in this collection in Smooth Sand Ripple and Fossil Sand Ripple — and puts it through the stylising eye of Art Deco, the design movement that spent the 1920s and 30s turning natural forms into repeatable, geometric pattern. The result is a two-part wall sculpture, each panel 100cm by 22cm, carved and cast in white marble stone, with a spiral folded into the ripple line so the two motifs, wave and spiral, read as one continuous gesture across the pair.
Art Deco took its material from everywhere: ancient Egyptian temple architecture, given fresh currency by the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, the hard edges of Cubism, and the machine forms of ocean liners and motorcars. But a great deal of its vocabulary came from nature filtered through geometry. A real wave, or a real dune, is irregular — no two crests identical, no rhythm quite repeating. Deco design took that same subject matter and regularised it: waves became stacked chevrons, spray became a fan of straight lines, and spirals stood in for anything that curled, a breaking wave, a frond, a shell. The point was never to copy nature exactly. It was to extract a form from nature and repeat it with the confidence of an engineer, so that a wave motif on a cinema façade or a cocktail cabinet read as modern rather than picturesque. Deco Dune Ripple sits in that tradition: the ripple is recognisably a ripple, but it has been simplified into a run of confident, evenly spaced curves with a spiral worked into the design, rather than left as a naturalistic transcription of sand.
The two panels are carved first, then cast, in white marble stone, and the finish matters here as much as the drawing of the line, because a Deco relief like this lives or dies on the crispness of its edges. Soft, rounded ridges would blur the geometry; the carving keeps a firmer edge along each curve so the piece throws a cleaner line of shadow than a naturalistic ripple would. Through the day, as light swings around a room or across a garden wall, that shadow line moves with it — steep and dark when the light rakes low across the surface, almost disappearing when the light comes from straight ahead. It is a piece that rewards a wall with some changing light on it, rather than a corridor lit flat and evenly all day.
Hung as a pair with a visible gap between the two panels — the sculpture's stated dimensions exclude that gap, so plan the wall space accordingly. Each panel is 100cm wide, and the two together span 44cm in height once a sensible gap is set between them. It works equally well indoors or outside, and because the panels share one continuous line of design, they need to be hung level with each other, with consistent spacing, so the ripple reads as a single movement rather than two separate objects placed near one another.
Deco Dune Ripple is priced at £880, each of the two panels measuring 100cm x 22cm x 6cm, with a combined footprint of 100cm x 44cm x 6cm excluding the gap between them. It is individually carved and cast in white marble stone, and, like the rest of the collection, available in other sizes and surface finishes by arrangement with the studio.
Deco Dune Ripple wall sculpture — 100cm x 44cm x 6cm (two parts, excluding gap), white marble stone. View the piece