Over the years, I shifted from making purely functional ware to combining functional forms with sculptural elements. Now, my most recent work is different in that it is entirely sculptural, but I see it as a continuation of themes I have been working with before, now blended with some newer thoughts and concerns.
While I was making functional ware, I became interested in how those forms interact with the anatomy of the people using them, especially in the hands that would hold the cups I was making, especially concentrating on how the anatomy of hands allows such a variety of functions including the ability to communicate feelings and ideas, even without the use of formal sign languages.
While sculpting vase forms with arms and hands that could express such feelings and ideas, I noticed the female shape of the vases and considered the ways that women can signal strength and self-determination, even in a culture that does not encourage us to speak in those ways.
Now, as the years go by, I am more aware of worry about aging. My mother had always feared looking older, and advertising and the cultural chat have long spread that fear, but what has changed for me is how my contemporaries and I are seeing signs of aging in our own selves.
During the years of Covid isolation, I took a remote class in sculpting busts. Without a live model, we worked from photographs, and I chose one of an actress I admire, Joan Hickson, who in her older years played the part of Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s elderly and often overlooked sleuth. Neither Miss Marple nor Joan Hickson seemed at all interested in trying to disguise their age.
In order for a sculpture of human hands or faces human faces not to look bizarre and alien, it is necessary to concentrate on the anatomy in some detail, so I looked very carefully at the features in my photograph, including the ways in which those features showed age. I studied anatomy texts, art texts, and myself in the mirror, and then I worked to form those aspects in my sculpture.
When, finally, I felt satisfied my work in that sculpture, I decided to look for more photos on-line of elderly female faces, seeking ones which gave that same feeling of internal power and unworried acceptance of aging, and I made three more busts. I call the four of them, “Intrepid.”