Sculpting Absence and Hearing Silence
Karen LaMonte’s Interventions at Cheekwood
In her latest exhibition, Interventions, at the historic Cheekwood Estate, Karen LaMonte engages in a profound ontological inquiry into the nature of the human figure. By rendering the body through its absence as revealed in its garment, LaMonte destabilizes the traditional relationship between the viewer, the sculpted object, and the historical site. Her practice is rooted in what she describes as “radical material honesty,” where the inherent properties of glass, iron, and bronze are not merely decorative but conceptual agents in the exploration of time, absence, and cultural identity. Music City Review interviewed LaMonte ahead of her exhibition, regarding the intersection of her sculptural methodology with the “negative space” of silence in music, the research to achieve precision in her cloud studies, and how she transforms institutional spaces into sites of profound reflection.
MCR: Your sculptures often render the human figure through absence rather than presence. How do you think about the emotional or spiritual charge of an “empty” garment form, particularly when placed in a historic and horticultural setting like Cheekwood?
KL: Silence is humbling, emptiness is haunting, but they also make space for people. I feel like we live in an overstimulated, over-entertained world, and we rarely get a moment of reflection and almost never a moment of self-reflection.
The absent figure is a surreal proposition, unexpected, but at the same time, the beauty of the sculptures is inviting. I hope those two things together make a charge, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. I am literally making space for people. The space is there for the viewer. I would not dream of trying to define the experience the viewer has there; the sculptures are simply an invitation, an open door.
I love them in the period rooms because they are an invitation, also. The rooms are frozen in time, like someone from the past who lived there could suddenly walk in. Their invitation is to imagine what it was like to live in an era radically different from our own, in lives radically different from ours.
Together, the whole installation is a great stage for the viewer to inhabit, perceive, and project into.
MCR: Sculpture in glass, bronze, ceramic, and marble each carries distinct historical and symbolic weight. How do material choices function conceptually in Interventions, especially within Cheekwood’s estate environment?
KL: I am a material girl. I believe in radical material honesty: that the material itself has meaning, and that meaning is as important to the sculpture as the idea and the form.
In this exhibition, there are sculptures in cast iron, silver bronze, aluminum, and cast glass.
Iron is human, natural, and industrial all at the same time. It is in our blood and at the core of our planet. We even say that it runs in veins through the earth. I like to think of it as blood through the flesh of our planet.
I intentionally rust the surface of my sculptures. Rusting iron is a material in perpetual transformation. This allows me to sculpt in four dimensions because time is an integral part of the sculpture.
I chose silver bronze for the Nocturnes, not classical bronze, because it glows with the cool light of evening. The material needed to capture the dark tones in the play of light and shadow across its surface. You see this in the drapery of the Reclining Nocturne.
I find bronze fascinating because it is an engineered alloy, a timeless material that is completely man-made and doesn’t corrode. We have a version of history written in bronze monuments, a record of both victories and failures, an attempt to immortalize everything from heroes to dictators.
The empty clothes I create are something very different; they are intimate and personal. It’s fun using bronze for them because it subverts that history, turning it into something we can all inhabit.
Aluminum is crazy. It is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, but the metallic form we all know doesn’t exist in nature. We make it basically by running a lightning bolt through a solution of aluminum oxide. I use it because it is the closest thing to sculpting with light and shadow.
Glass is a nightmare, it is extremely difficult to work with, but I return to it again and again because it is the only material that lets me weave together the visible and invisible. I make transparent clothing that reveals the impression of a body without a biography. I use glass because its strength and subtlety let me reinterpret the female nude. I see the empty glass dress as a lens that examines culture and identity.
For the Nocturnes, it took me years to make glass the color of night. Part of the inspiration came from the ancient Egyptians, who thought that precious blue stones and glass were actually pieces of the heavens. I used this glass to make absent female forms rising from penumbral garments. The shadowy color is a figuration of night.
MCR: Music City Review engages artists across disciplines—music, visual art, architecture, performance, and design. Do you think of your sculptural practice as intersecting with other art forms in structural or conceptual ways? For instance, are there parallels to choreography, architecture, literature, or even silence and negative space as expressive strategies?
KL: For sure, everything I do is an interplay of many disciplines. When I begin researching a new body of work, I throw the net as wide as I can looking at science, all types of art, history and music.
For example, many of the sculptures on view are from a series I call Nocturnes and Études. In 2009, I became focused on night and I began to think about the human body in a much larger and more abstract context. I wanted to look at how we interpret the infinite space that surrounds us, how we place ourselves in it and try to find relevance in a largely indifferent universe.
The musical compositions of Chopin and John Field were a big inspiration, and that is actually where the title comes from. Their music focused on atmosphere over narrative, which is what I was doing when I made my female figurations of night.
The absence of the figure in the sculptures is to me like the silence in music; it lets you see what is around it more clearly and experience it more fully.
For my cloud sculptures, I leaned in a different direction. I do a tremendous amount of work to preserve real details, like the warp and weft of the fabric in the dress sculptures. I think they function like a bridge for the viewer to connect with the artwork. But I didn’t know how to capture real clouds, so I started working with several climatologists who run large simulations of the atmosphere. From them, we were able to pull out the form of real clouds.
MCR: The term “intervention” can imply critique. Is there an element of institutional or cultural critique embedded in this exhibition, or is the gesture more poetic than polemical?
KL: My greatest hope is that everyone has their own unique reaction to my sculptures. I see my job as creating objects, and I don’t want to limit their meaning. I hope they become catalysts for people to see the world differently, to have new thoughts and perceptions. I’ve heard so many different interpretations of my artwork that I never imagined, and I love it.
My sculptures don’t have heads because they are not portraits of specific people but portraits of all of us, our shared beauty and humanity.
So, in that sense, I see my gestures as poetic and human, but for someone else, it’s totally possible and legitimate if they see it as a critique.
MCR: Looking ahead, what do you hope Nashville audiences carry with them after encountering Interventions at Cheekwood—an image, a question, a feeling, or perhaps a new awareness of space itself?
KL: I always like to talk about what inspires me. I do not make sculpture with a specific goal in mind but with a great love for exploration and adventure. For me, making sculpture is the way I explore my thoughts and the material world around me. If people come away with a renewed sense of curiosity about any of the many themes that flow through my sculpture or the materials they are made from, I would be thrilled!
LaMonte’s Interventions ultimately functions as a study of the “four-dimensional” nature of art, where time and oxidation are as much a part of the medium as the cast metal itself. By deconstructing the female nude and stripping it of “biography,” she invites a reimagining of identity—one defined not by the presence of the flesh, but by the traces it leaves behind in the material world.
Whether navigating the “penumbral” depths of her glass Nocturnes or the industrial weight of her rusted iron forms, the Nashville audience is invited into a space of active contemplation. LaMonte’s practice transcends the purely decorative, offering instead a bridge between the scientific precision of climatology and the evocative silence of a musical rest. As the exhibition demonstrates, her work does not merely occupy space; it creates a lens through which the viewer may examine the fragile, enduring intersection of culture, nature, and the self.
Note: Cheekwood’s Interventions program, made possible through the generosity of the Sandra Schatten Foundation, was launched in 2021 as an arts initiative to activate the Mansion’s period rooms. The series invites nationally and internationally recognized artists to create new works of art connected to and inspired by the Cheek family, and the period rooms that reflect the way the family lived at Cheekwood. As a regular visitor of the mansion and estate, I must say that this program is wonderful in keeping this shared cultural treasure (Cheekwood) rich and relevant for new visitors and returning members!
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