Reflective Resonance

Width from finger to finger – 265cm (widest point). Length in total, finger to foot – 470cm. Distance between the arms 118cm (if arms are taken off). Floor to top of sculpture (i.e with stone) 254/255cm. Floor to top of shoulder 175cm
Shoulder to foot (if arms are taken off) 390-400cm

Gerhard Schoeman, 2013
In contrast to the small-scale figures in From Explicit to Implicit, the stone sculpture Reflective Resonance is huge. It reminds me of a thinking stone, a large portrait of silent reflection, which one might discover stranded on a beach. The sculpture brings to mind Rodin’s Thinker and Dürer’s winged genius in his engraving Melencolia I. The stone thinks: it is sentient. Who would’ve thought that something so hard and large could evoke something so gentle as thinking: the figure is out of time and out of joint, and yet perfectly present in the moment. We experience its utmost solitude, as if from a place deep inside.

Thinking displaces the thinker: from here to there, and back. Thinking is a form of mindfulness and absorption: there where you see absorption, in a person or thing, the fullness of their being is intertwined with their not being there. We see what is not there. Embodied thought, concentrated thinking, makes strangers of us all. We travel places, wrapped in our thoughts, and we leave our friends and family behind.