A Bright Fortress

(Seaside Residence II by Pia Stern)

“Pia Stern’s Seaside Residence II shows a structure (a ‘residence’) on the very edge of the waves. They surge relentlessly towards it, almost, it seems, engulfing it; yet the structure stands. The unpredictability of the furrowed water, swaying inexorably inwards, does not substantially affect the ‘residence’. It is a bright fortress, which apparently exists by other principles. If wild water is black and white, then the human home of the spirit is luminous with colour, bright enough to reflect onto the incoming waves, though not to deflect them. Stern shows us two ways of being: the physical, answerable only to accident, to wind and tide; and the spiritual, answerable to inward truth. One is free-flowing; the other is fixed, confident, grounded in more than its own small compass – in God.”

~Wendy Beckett