Breath as Sculpture: Giuseppe Penone,
Breath of Leaves, 1979
Artwork
Penone’s Breath of Leaves (1979), exhibited in Thoughts in Roots at Serpentine South, which I visited over the summer break, explores the notion of breath as sculpture. The work, composed of boxwood leaves arranged in a floor-based installation, reveals both a trace of a human figure and the outline of a magnified leaf emerging from the pile. According to Penone (2025), the leaves, originally gathered from the mountainous landscape of his birthplace, frame breathing as a spatial phenomenon, dissolving boundaries between body, Nature and sculpture in cyclical and lyrical rhythms. As Penone (2025) reflects:
‘To fill a space with the meanders of breath, the volume of breath produced by an individual’s life is a sculpture; so too is the volume of breath of a single life mingling with the volume of air that glides over the spinning globe, joining the infinite swirls and spirals of the wind.’
In this way, breath becomes both intimate and cosmic, an invisible exchange between body as atmosphere. Threes breathe in what we breath out, and we breathe in what they release. For me, this reciprocity in the work, gestures toward an arboreal temporality, an ongoing cycle of interconnection between the body and the land.
Penone’s understanding of breath as sculptural gesture resonates deeply with my practice. In my work, I explore breath as a cathartic return through olfactory materials like caraway seeds or charred pine, and sometimes imagined scents like the sweating skin of a horse. These materials trace bodily presence, memory, time, landscape, and domestic intimacy, positioning the body as a site of intersecting circular, ephemeral, spiritual system. Just as Penone’s boxwood leaves render breath and scent into sculptural volume, my organic materials sculpt memory of, and a return to a home, in the cycles of respiration: repeated, rhythmic, alive, and deeply spiritual.
Giuseppe Penone, Breath of Leaves, 1979. Boxwood leaves. Dimensions variable. Installation view at Serpentine South, London, 2025.
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