Valerie Fletcher: Walter Dusenbery started his career as a sculptor working as a studio assistant to the Japanese-American sculptor, Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi was one of the great practitioners of direct carving, working in a variety of materials, but best known for his carvings in stone. Noguchi himself had been a studio assistant to the great Constantin Brancusi who was one of the founding fathers of the direct-carve movement. The ideas underlying this movement is that by working directly with natural materials like wood and stone, the artist remains in direct contact with nature and Noguchi was one of the most sophisticated practitioners of this. Dusenbery learned from Noguchi not only the sophisticated techniques of carving and of selecting fine and beautiful stones to work with, but also the Zen concept – that by working with materials that come from the Earth, you remain in contact with the Earth. Noguchi once said that working with stone was like being in contact with all of ancient pre-civilization going back to the formation of the earth.

Dusenbery’s piece called Pedogna from 1977 is carved from exquisite Italian travertine marble. Travertine is a very porous stone. It’s also one that can have a variety of colorations. In its natural state, it tends to be white, but mineral and other biological impurities can cause stones ranging from pale yellow to deep burnt amber. In this case, a kind of rosy autumnal color pervades this massive piece of stone. In some cases, you can see even the striations of the stone itself showing the layers of antiquity that it took to form this stone.

The title of the sculpture refers to the quarry in Tuscany, Italy, from which the stone came. With striations that you can see in this piece, it is a manifestation of the great eons of time that it took to form this world and may remind us of the wonders of our natural environment.