‘Life is one long decay, no? There's a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city’ Urs Fischer
In his book The Hare With Amber Eyes,
the ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal
talks about the way patina ‘is a process
of rubbing back so that the essential is
revealed… But it also seems additive, in the
way that a piece of oak furniture gains over
years and years of polishing’. Dating from
the late fifteenth century, the domed
Bada Gumbad is one of a complex of three
structures — gateway, mosque and pavilion
— in New Delhi’s Lodi Garden. Over the
centuries the interface between intentional
pattern and incidental patina on its
elevations of grey quartzite, red sandstone
and black marble has become increasingly
fluid, each tiny mark and incremental loss
creating a subtly new composition.
Photography
John Pawson