I have been creating little terracotta figurines for years. They relate to a different creative place than my work constructed in wood and metal tube. The figurines are small enough to be held and worked in the hand. I have always found it hard to explain them to people, but with the increased sense of insecurity and threat in these troubled times, I have resolved to attempt to do so.
I find myself modelling these little figures in clay when I feel a need to pay homage to life: they are a prayer enacted through the modelling of clay. "Please life, be resilient, stay strong, I have faith in you, no matter what predatory acts or abusive behaviour human beings display towards you."
The sculptures are not intended to represent literal women, nor are they images of any particular divinity, though sometimes I may think of them as generic Earth Goddesses, metaphorical images of the natural world or of life on Earth.
The gift of life, of nature, has been expressed as 'female' over millennia - magnificent tiny female figurines were created by early Paleolithic peoples. Such figurines have been found in prehistoric sites all over the world. I believe it is a human instinct, drummed out of us by the doctrine of 'the one and only true God (male)', a doctrine that confirmed patriarchy on the one hand and dominion over nature on the other.
My little figurines are often very round, like the fruits of nature so generously offered for our nourishment or like the miracle of Planet Earth itself. They are tender in anatomical articulation, the form of shoulders, elbows, hips, hands, neck, are modelled with care to allow the eye to both 'feel' detail and to flow easily from part to part as a cohesive whole, front, back and sides. There is nothing of the brutalising simplification or stylisation of form that is the essence of modernism, for they are not expressions of self, nor totems of power. Tenderness is not to be sentimental - nature's power is indifferent - it destroys as it creates. Flesh seems too vulnerable to survive its hazards, but survive it does from generation to generation, creature to creature. It is a miracle that never ceases to amaze. Tenderness is not to evoke human 'beauty', these are not fertility goddesses. They are not objects of erotic desire! These figurines are worked to honour the natural world and that means on the one hand respecting the body, bone and flesh, and on the other to endow the form with inner vitality, independent to itself, as 'life' itself.
I am blessed by the many birds that visit my garden. They are an inspiration, a hope, a comfort and an example. Often my figurines are accompanied by a bird. It is a prayer for the birds as representative of all forms of life. The suggestion is often that the presence of the bird is an honour, sometimes felt with some awe. In Celtic mytholgy, birds were closely related to ideas of the 'divine'.
Perhaps this motif is also a prayer for happy symbiosis between human beings and nature in general. It is my antidote to Trumpism, to climate change deniers, to corporate industries that bespoil environments and pollute the earth, to human greed which surveys nature in terms of material gain. It is my protest against the commodifying principal that lies at the base of our society, to our cruelty and arrogance. It is my link across millennia to the earliest homo sapiens. I would like to leave this homage to future generations as past generations left their indicators of the 'sacred' to us.
