Elyn Zimmerman
Font, 1993
Granite
Museum Purchase
As a student working on her BFA and MFA degrees at UCLA, Elyn Zimmerman focused on painting and photography. Then, in 1977, she took a fateful trip to India. There, she visited the Ellora caves — a complex of sacred cave sites cut directly into the basalt cliffs of the Charanandri Hills. It was from that point that Zimmerman’s decades-long love affair with stone began. As she herself has written, “I was changed from being a painter to becoming a sculptor; from having a private vision to having a public one; from thinking about the ephemeral to creating the physical. I was taken from working in the single discipline of painting to working in the multiple and interrelated disciplines of sculpture, landscape and architecture.”
In the decades that followed, Zimmerman continued to travel and draw inspiration from the uses of stone found in ancient sites across many cultures. The shape of "Font", for instance, was inspired by an ancient Egyptian altar that featured a round stone sunk into a table.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zimmerman created a number of temporary installations rooted in Land Art ideas about site-specific interactions with natural landscapes. By the mid-1980s, she began working in a more permanent way, creating interventions that blurred the line between sculpture and landscape architecture in urban environments. In these busy city sites, Zimmerman was able to turn non-descript public spaces filled with the bustle of quotidian life into places of beauty and stillness. Notable sites where her work has been installed include the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC, the AT&T Headquarters in New Jersey, the Dade County Courthouse in Miami, Moffitt Cancer Center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, among many others.
Font is an example of the way in which Zimmerman pairs hard stone, particularly granite, with water, its natural frenemy, so that her work intuitively evokes ideas of balance, of a tension between stasis and change, and of deep time against whose measure most human drama seems irrelevant. The artist invites and encourages passersby to engage with the sculpture. She wants viewers to touch it and sit on it so that they might have a private refuge in public space. Hearing the murmur of the water streaming over the smooth black stone, you might have a deep revelation, you might just let your mind go blank, or you might experience something else entirely.