The Exeter Riddle points elsewhere, or does it?

Image: © Tom Jolliffe Taken: 12 Mar 2010

The Exeter Riddle echoes the work of Pol Bury in his fountain sculpture amongst the Buren Columns in the Palais Royale in Paris. In the fountain sculpture, (also public art), the stainless steel balls are composed from two independently moving hemispheres which reflect the ancient buildings and the modern world. They too, by the nature of their shape and their reflective surfaces, show us a frozen moment in time if we look into them. Michael Fairfax's sculpture shares in this enigmatic characteristic, giving us our moment in serial time. The steel balls act like extreme wide angle lenses, wrapping us up in a 360 degree environment, converting our existence into a microcosm. If you study the image, you will notice that each ball reflects a different microcosm covering different elements in a different "mise en scene" including reflections of other steel balls containing their own reflections. A more obviously enigmatic aspect is that the sculpture is inscribed with riddles which are reflected in planes of the sculpture to assist us to "read" them in a conventional fashion, from left to right, horizontally across the "page". But perhaps we are meant to read them in their reverse image to challenge our minds to wander to other mirrors in other works of art that shift our sense of perception and our existence. Jean Cocteau's "Orphee" springs to mind. It is good to have a Sphinx-like presence in the high street, over and beyond time.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0