Steel Pulse

American Artist Carol Bove On Crushing, Crashing And Twisting Heavy Metal Into Better Shape

- Caroline Roux

On a snowy day in March, all sorts of things are happening in Carol Bove’s studio. An assistant in a white Tyvek suit is stripping down a sculpture – one of the seven lively blue forms that stood like an abstract family outside the Swiss Pavilion in Venice during the 2017 art biennale. Another is welding a huge steel tube, which seems to have writhed into submission, crushed and doubled up on itself. Gordon Terry, Bove’s husband and the studio’s managing partner, is showing a couple around the huge space. ‘He has oversight,’ says Bove, ‘but he’s really doing his own stuff right now.’ Terry, also an artist, is currently studying philosophy. ‘We talk about Kant all the time,’ adds Bove. She’s laughing, but in all seriousness, her work is as much about the psychological as it is about occupying and disrupting the space around it, asking for an unconscious response to its often unlikely presence.