Tag: sculpture

Recumbent Figure

Harmonizing vertebrae.

This is not a poster, you said. Not something to be grasped while riding on top of a bus. This would admit no witness without proximity.

Your body a landscape of fossil-ripe skin. Your body an ancient object of bone, stone, shell and wood, the promontory above storied seas, the cave of hillside forests. 

Your body inviting touch, that the fingers may know the harmony of its swells and hollows, the full aria of its full-throated longings, even at rest.

***

Inspired by the sculpture of Henry Moore.

Material Concerns

In the garden of mirrored monsters.

In the end, it was the materials that killed her. But isn’t this always the case, these days? she might have said, taking aim at another plaster sculpture. In the beginning, her thing was to hide bags of paint inside, to bleed an aftermath. 

When she was done with shooting, she became mother to the monsters. It was a dream vision. Why? someone asked. They locked her up. In lieu of an answer, she returned to her creatures.

See the sphinx, a flower blooming from one breast, her insides shards of mirror. But why? Inquiries persisted. The monsters grew. To heal, she said. A joyland, she named it, locus for a new kind of life.

What kind? someone wondered. 

One where when your face breaks, it bursts into a tree.

Someone called it an apocalypse in paradise. She did not object.

***

Inspired by the work of Niki de Saint Phalle.

Unfinished Business

Matters of making sense.

There is a sculpture in the center of our circle. We look, and when the speaking begins, it becomes clear that while we have been looking toward the same object in space, we have not seen the same sculpture.

It has often been assumed that when the eye sees, the spirit will know, but knowing is a palette, not a product.

One of us had a question. When working, how much of a given environment do you censor to meet what demands? He saw no difference between painting and sculpture, the idea being that any picture is a living thing, sculpted by changes imposed from outside, and never done.

***

Inspired by American sculptor David Smith. The italicized question above is his.