Exhibits at University of Missouri Libraries: M.L. Snowden Collection

M.L. Snowden has won the world’s most prestigious sculpture prize, The International Rodin Competition in Tokyo, Japan, and most recently was awarded the inaugural Presidential Order of Merit “In Recognition of Significant Contributions to the Betterment of Humanity Through Art,” presented by the Fine Art Foundation with the sculptor’s work recently added to the Presidential art collection at the White House. The sculptor maintains studios in southern California, Paris and Austria.

M.L. Snowden is the sole living inheritor of select 19th century marble carving, finishing, casting and bronze patination techniques from the Paris studios of Auguste Rodin and Antonin Mercié. She sculpted alongside her father for seventeen years as an apprentice and as a professional in Snowden Studios. In 1990, she inherited a collection of 38 of the original sculpting tools from the Rodin Studios. Rodin’s tools were bequeathed to M.L. Snowden’s father by the Swiss sculptor, Robert Georges Eberhard.

Lunas reflects the silvered arc of the moon. Through a highly tactile and shining surface, Snowden explores the concept of the moon as a reflector of a portion of the sun’s energy as well as albedo – the reflected light of earth. As bronze, the work considers states of mood, energy and radiance across a range of dimensional nuances that vibrantly interact with natural light. Lunas’s levitated weight burgeons from its cratered environment, pivoting on an awakened sense of balance. Over hundreds of hours, Snowden has conjured a white-veined variant of the historic Fournier patina that promotes a smooth glowing surface on bronze.

In a lute-like composition, Lightspire’s bronze ascends through a pillar of rays. Here, the immaterial streamlined quality of curving light rays reverberate along arched anatomical planes. Multiple rays of light conceptually rise along the line of demi-wings and echo in every part of the sculpture that has been created through the energy of the sculptor’s touch. A core meditation of Snowden invokes the realization that when viewed at a reduced quantum micro-scale, the human body as well as geological clay and bronze, all begin to exhibit the "wave and particle" structure of light. It was Louis De Broglie winner of the Nobel Prize, who delineated the wave and the particle as integrated expressions of matter. Undulation, "S" curvature, and waves are inseparable from the central feminine particle of Lightspire that seems to jettison energy aloft. Lightspire’s portrait seems enclosed in the embers of a textural crown that melds and connects in upward ascent. The energy of the sculpture promotes the illusion of wind that seems to rise beneath the almost two-hundred pound weight of the sculpture.

Lightwave is the sculptor’s sweeping signature that draws an arc of light. Indeed, all of Snowden’s sculptures express the highly gestural and athletic root of the artist’s touch. In science, the smallest micro-viewpoint onto light reveals light to exhibit either a wave or particle structure. For the sculptor, the "S" Wave in particular, is an inspiring and suffusing quantity that is reflected in the shape of the human hand and in the properties of elemental molten bronze. Indeed for Snowden, curvatures of form naturally pool in molten bronze, mirroring the s-curvature of light phenomena that also are reflected in human anatomy. As sculpture, Lightwave’s central focus moves forward from optical comprehension, accessing feeling as much as tactile polished volume.

Photon halts mid-flight caught in the sudden seizure of art. Indeed, Snowden’s sculpture brings Photon into full-frame focus, where a photon is the smallest organized piece of energetic matter. It is an elementary particle; the force carrier of the electromagnetic force. Indeed, it was Einstein who observed that light is a stream of tiny energy packets called photons. Moreover, Louis De Broglie’s studies presented the duality of light that exhibits characteristics as both a wave and as a particle. The sculpture of Snowden forms around the enlargement of a single particle or Photon that imaginatively capsulates dynamic ramparts, circling spirals and curving waves through its particulate form. The figural particle-element has been built of innumerable wave-curvatures and set weld points. The design lifts upon the sculptor’s advanced invention for bronze inner-wall construction that makes Photon’s quarter-ton suspension possible.

Snowden’s Solaris evokes the radiant nucleus of the sun. As an auteur of bronze extrusion and experimental welding protocols, Snowden orchestrates the composition to emit thin dramatic bronze rays as an "energy corona pattern" generated by the heart of the star. With metallurgical subtlety, Snowden suggests a solar portrait that provokes intense consideration on every level of the bronze, from the gestural hands to the coronal mass ejection that sweeps the composition into a lyrical band that frames Solaris’s facial mask. Like Polaris, Solaris conveys a greater sense of dynamism through a composition that suggests that evolving suns configure energy transmissions in off-centered patterns. In Solaris, fractal patterns resonate within figural musculature and asymmetrical spiked whorls that have been generated from the charged fingers and tools of the sculptor.

Lightsurge coils on the spring of its own energy. Lightsurge takes shape around Snowden’s intuition of a radiant wavelength that together with Lightwave, expresses the substance of light almost as a rhythmic veil or sonic cloth. Evoking a small portion of a long train of light sweeping a cosmic trajectory, Lightsurge comes into view as an enlargement of the "S" structure of light.  As one critic recently observed, " Here in these works, the sculptor has achieved the inexpressible essence of light captured in an eternal bronze moment".