Christine Corday wants you to touch every one of her 10,000-pound sculptures at CAM

When Christine Corday began thinking about "Relative Points," her new exhibit opening January 18 at the Contemporary Art Museum, she looked to the stars. Specifically, she considered the history of what humans have placed as “center,” and “the heretical fact that no, the Earth isn’t actually the center of the heavens.” Once you realize that our solar system and sun aren’t the center of the universe and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just one of trillions of galaxies, she says, you “realize that actually the universe doesn’t have a center, and if you were to find a center, every point would be a center.”

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(c) 2019 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Installing "Relative Points" at CAM. From left: Orlando Thompson, Christopher Powers, and John Colurciello.

How that thought manifests itself inside of CAM is through 12, 10,000-pound compressions of iron, other elemental metals, and metalloids into cylindrical forms that allow you to experience the redefinition of “center.” Each cylinder comes to a point, and each one is oriented to the center of the universe, which, Corday says, “given that there is no center, each one is pointed nowhere or everywhere.” The selection of iron as the material was an important one. “Once stars start forming iron in their core, it’s basically the death knell and forces them to go into supernova,” Corday says. “And yet, we have 4 grams of it in our bodies. So that's kind of an interesting thing, just to kind of ponder or sit with or actually feel.”

(c) 2019 Andy Snow Photography

Moving "Relative Points" at Palmer Manufacturing, Springfield, Ohio

Corday and CAM’s executive director Lisa Melandri wanted "Relative Points" to be a full-sensory experience. Visitors will be invited to touch every one of the pieces of sculpture, which have surface layers that slough off—you might leave with a small piece of the iron works. Heat is important to Corday; normally she uses extreme temperature that allows people to experience the metal between a solid and liquid state. With "Relative Points," she says, “I wanted to replace those industrial-scale tools with something far more subtle, and that would be the heat caused by the friction of the human finger running along the surface of the sculpture.”

When you visit CAM, Corday advises you to spend as much time with the works as possible—she likes the thought of slowing down, moving in a pace from an evolutionary perspective, that is deliberate. A thought to carry with you as you explore her work: “Understand that elemental iron is a material that is used in the sculpture, is created in stars, and it exists in your body. It exists within the infrastructure of the museum. It is connecting the human scale with the cosmological scale. I think in light of the cosmological, humans can feel insignificant. I've never conceived that or seen it that way. Because the material is born in stars, then inherently you are the scale of the cosmos.”