A Sabbatical Story of Time, Place, and Rediscovery
Sculptor Bradley Borthwick creates a significant body of work reflecting a year wandering and observing in southern France
As an artist, Bradley Borthwick understands the importance of maintaining a vibrant artistic practice. As a full-time professor, he knows the difficulty of finding time to make it happen. The dilemma has consequences beyond himself.
“If I’m not consistent with my own practice, I’m not there with who I am,” said the sculptor and associate professor of art. “I’m forgetting, or missing, what it is I’m asking my students to do.”
As his sabbatical year approached in 2023, he saw an opportunity to regain elements of his studio practice. He could take his family and engage with a place outside his language and culture. A place where a sense of obscurity could inform his creative process. A place he had never been.
“The idea was to relocate for the sake of an experience that would undo or unwind the habits and training with which I typically work … or return to something I used to know,” said Borthwick, who is at his best when working in stone.
A sabbatical in France
He chose Puyloubier, a Provence, France, village rich with visual and cultural offerings. As a sculptor, he was drawn to the region’s marble quarries, colored clay, spectacular natural light, ancient history, and limestone escarpments, buttes, and mesas. Grant money as a Haynesville Project Fellow would allow him to live amongst the locals and purchase marble to carve.
The only remaining piece was to answer his most pressing question. “Could sabbatical be a time and space to approach what I do in ways I haven’t utilized in a long time?”
His answer? A resounding “yes.”
Eleven months after touching down in France, Borthwick opened a solo exhibition titled une œuvre … un monument … ou plutôt, me voilà au travail. The show included photographic prints, impractically large ceramic tiles, and six marble sculptures, including five long, flat slabs with “waves of marble,” flowing and abstract almost like a painting, signaling a significant diversion from his more precision-based practice.
The exhibition, which was shown in Espace Saint-Marie, Puyloubier’s recently restored 11th-century church, reflected Borthwick’s experience in the region he came to know and love. “His work,” said former Colby President William “Bro” Adams, who spends six months a year in Puyloubier, “is an essay in close and steady observation of the visual landscape.”
Wandering with intention
With a medium-format film camera and sketchbook, Borthwick roamed the valleys and ridges of the regions Bouches-du-Rhône, Var, and Luberon, open and observant. He traversed cart tracks, laneways, and vineyards. He happened upon Roman bridges and ruins, threading together past and present. He rambled through villages and lost himself in libraries.
Always, he wandered with the spirit of a flâneur.
Flâner. A French verb meaning to wander with a subtle intention,yet not being held by that intention
While his broad intention was to create marble sculptures, what they reflected would be determined by his time wandering the larger landscape. Among his fascinations were wrought iron bars covering windows on village buildings. Decorative and curvy, or plain and straight, he saw them as a phenomenon of time and culture worth exploring in stone.
He began with marble blocks and slabs secured from an ancient Roman quarry in Béziers, France. The slabs, however, lacked the physical integrity to receive hammer and chisel in a way that Borthwick needed. He pivoted and obtained Carrara marble from Pietrasanta, Italy, a “beautiful material to work with,” said the sculptor.
“I started with the first one, in these ways that would typify my practice in the last 20 years,” which tends toward linear, measured form. “I nearly completed that first slab and could see that I was nowhere near this change or shift I thought I needed to be approaching.”
In the footsteps of Cézanne
He continued wandering, turning his attention to the area with respect to art history. He learned that Paul Cézanne, the French painter born in nearby Aix, painted extensively in the area between 1885 and his death in 1906. “Cézanne made more than 100 paintings and drawings at Château Noir and the adjacent Bibémus quarry, including some of his best and most celebrated landscapes,” wrote Adams, an expert on the French painter.
“I’ve been going to the [Bibémus quarry] for years, and I very much wanted Bradley to see it,” said Adams, coauthor of the forthcoming book Paul Cézanne at Château Noir: The History of a Fascination.
“It’s a place made for sculptors and painters—beautiful ochre sandstone cut in dramatic ways. Outdoor sculptures, almost, made by artisans who started mining the site in Roman times and by the natural erosion of the rock over time. When I learned of Bradley’s interest in stone cutting, marble, and rocks, it seemed like a natural fit.”
Adams and Borthwick sustain a friendship that began at Colby and share a mutual interest in art. Overlapping in France for six months, they “spent a fair amount of time together talking about art, his art, and this place,” said Adams. The conversations contextualized Borthwick’s work and were sprinkled with Adams’s “great advice.”
Bibémus quarry is one of the places where Cézanne came into his own later in life. By painting its rock formations and geometries, he pushed his approach from Impressionism toward Modernism, said Borthwick. It was Cézanne’s “major shift in his painterliness,” as Borthwick called it, that he himself sought.
With renewed inspiration, he returned to his craft.
Rediscovery
The sculptor approached his Italian marble slabs and began by laying down his iron bar motif. “Then I just put down all of my normal tools that measure, mark, and scale and help me find where I need to be in the material,” he said. “I just resorted to a very few tools and my intuition.”
In the areas between the bar imprints, he created rippling patterns using only a set of chisels, a hammer, and a cutting wheel. He found a way to carve below his cut lines into a “very blurry kind of realm of surfaces,” which is counterintuitive to his previous training and how he teaches. Nothing was measured. Everything was free-flowing and abstracted in a way new to him.
The process transformed Borthwick.
He wrote to a friend, “I simply return to working with only my hands, with the intuition with which I danced throughout much of life. And in the end, after many weeks of steady and long hours, I found a new exhaustion. Or perhaps I found again an old exhaustion that I had misplaced.”
Later, reflecting on his breakthrough, he understood that what he learned from reading about and looking at Cézanne’s paintings was an appreciation for how an artist can be “reinvigorated by rediscovering their base sense for doing what they do.”
Post-sabbatical high
Back on Mayflower Hill this fall, Borthwick feels reinvigorated, healthy, and mindful of striking a balance between his work at Colby and in his studio.
In the classroom, he has channeled the energy and sense of accomplishment earned on sabbatical toward his teaching. “I tease my students that they’re lucky to have me after a year of doing my work. The enthusiasm and that need have translated into how I approach the curriculum.
“I’m layering in parts of my experience because I think they’re valuable. There’s a historical component to them and a whole narrative around them that still excites me,” said Borthwick. “And I hope it energizes what the students are experiencing.”
