The Axe

Three massive spruce trees are suspended from the ceiling. Each tree houses a carved reliquary, which in turn holds a small, delicately crafted sculpture: a worm made of wood, a marble axe, and a bronze bottle. Cut and sculpted by chainsaw—the tool of choice for the Swiss artist Claudia Comte, which is not known for its precision, but rather for its practicality and force—and slightly charred at the base, the trunks serve as pedestals. From wood sourced from the forest surrounding her childhood home in the Jura Mountains in Switzerland to ebony, marble, and bronze, Comte’s work expands the sculptural potential embedded in materials through the interplay of surfaces, shapes, and volumes. Driven by her interest in material memory and the careful observation of how the hand relates to different technologies, it investigates artisanal and mechanized production systems and natural materials in craft and sculpture.

In Sculpture Object 52: The Worm, Comte plays with the iconic serpentine shape, rendered through the carving, modeling, and smooth refining of ebony, a precious ornamental wood distinguished by its black mirroring polish, emphasizing the somewhat ironic and pop appeal of the finished sculpture.

The Axe embodies the tool’s expressive gesture of dissecting wood into manageable raw, workable material sections. As much as it recalls a history of craft, skill, and technical mastery, Comte’s practice is also loaded with pressing environmental concerns.

The Bottle deals with value, human waste, and disposability. The bronze cast of the foremost single-use plastic object could be read as a relic or a monument, a memento to remind us of the 450 years it would take this everyday object to decompose. Comte’s work is a sincere call to move past the extractive forms of production that dominate the present, featuring elements that speak from deep time to imagined futures.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)