Magnolia Leaves wall sculpture

The leaf shape that came before the bee

Magnolia Leaves takes as its subject one of the plant world's plainer, more confident forms: a simple, smooth-edged, leathery leaf, without lobes or teeth, rendered long and low across a single panel of white marble stone, 100cm by 30cm. The gentleness of the carving matches the gentleness of the subject. Magnolia leaves are broad, calm, undemonstrative shapes, and the relief keeps its texture correspondingly soft.

Magnolias belong to one of the older lineages among the flowering plants, a family whose fossil record reaches back tens of millions of years, to a period before bees had evolved at all. Their flowers, as a result, carry several features botanists read as comparatively ancestral: tough, undifferentiated tepals rather than separate petals and sepals, and a simple, sturdy structure robust enough to survive pollination by beetles, clumsy and destructive compared with a bee, rather than requiring the more delicate, specialised flower shapes that evolved later alongside bees and other more precise pollinators. The leaves share something of that same unhurried, early character. A magnolia leaf is typically a simple oval, whole along its edge rather than lobed or serrated, with a single central vein giving rise to a straightforward, evenly branching pattern on either side. Botanists generally regard smooth-edged, simply veined leaves like this as a more ancestral form among flowering plants, compared with the deeply lobed, toothed or compound leaves that many later-evolving plant groups developed. In other words, the plainness of a magnolia leaf is not a lack of sophistication. It is closer to an original template, largely unaltered while a great deal of the rest of the plant kingdom went on to elaborate.

Magnolia Leaves is carved by hand and then cast in white marble stone, its relief kept gentle rather than deeply cut, in keeping with the broad, unfussy shape of the leaves themselves. That restraint means the piece depends on a soft, even light to read at its best. Too harsh a raking light would carve the leaf shapes into something more dramatic than the calm subject calls for, while the piece is designed to hold its shape and shadow comfortably under ordinary, changing daylight through the day, the leaf edges picking up a little more definition as the sun lowers toward evening.

At 100cm long and only 30cm high, Magnolia Leaves is a distinctly horizontal piece, well suited to running along a stairwell wall, above a long run of low furniture, or across a wide but shallow stretch of garden wall, where its length can be appreciated without needing much height. Its calm, undemonstrative character makes it an easy piece to place near other natural-form works without competing with them.

Magnolia Leaves is priced at £800, a single wall sculpture measuring 100cm x 30cm x 6cm, individually carved and then cast in white marble stone, suitable for placement on a large interior or garden wall. It can be made to order in other sizes and surface finishes — contact the studio to discuss.

Magnolia Leaves wall sculpture — 100cm x 30cm x 6cm, white marble stone. View the piece