Personal Journey

I

I began making bronze sculpture as a way to reflect my own life’s journey. There is always a correlation between my individual sculptures and what is happening in my life. My work is like a personal journal, in a sense that the work resolves or characterizes my experiences. I have made sculptures to resolve a problem or to chronicle my joy and despair. Most evident in my work are relationships that I have experienced or observed. I am motivated by the absolute truth of the body’s posture. Since gestures are, for the most part, learned before any type of language is acquired and the non-verbal movement of the body never lies, there is honesty to this instinctive physical vocabulary. I believe there is an emotional equivalent to every physical gesture of the flesh. My sculptures display bodies conveying their own range of feelings in the forms of lovers and musicians to angels and bodies coded with expressions of introspection.The language of my sculpture contains my thoughts, my reactions, my perceptions, and the way that I process my life. They are also shadows and left over residue of a time in my own personal history. I think of my sculpture as ‘social sculpture’ with a universal narrative, emotions we all have in common. My sculptures are the faceless nature of non-verbal communication reflecting the human spirit.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

25 May, 2011

Apologia Pro Vita Sua
(A defense of one’s life)

No Cold and Heat

A monk asked Tozan, “How can we escape the cold and heat?” Tozan replied, “Why not go where there is no cold and heat?” “Is there such a place?” the monk asked. Tozan commented, “When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through.

As an artist who has dealt with the creative life for over half a century I can honestly say that the above koan has become one of my most referred to slogans. I have often found that no matter how raw my emotions become it is that which enables my work to nurture my spirit and remind me of the main purpose of art. The contact I feel with this abiding, consummate, ambrosial source is what makes my mood feel most alive.

As artist we cannot afford to escape the cold or the heat. We need the freezing weather and the incandescence and we should delight in the awakening effects of these opposites. One of my most beloved teachers Pema Chodron reminds us to cultivate a mind that does not grasp at right and wrong and that if we do this we will find a fresh state of being. The ultimate cessation of suffering comes from that freedom. In Pema Chodron’s ‘The Wisdom of no Escape she recalls how ravens love the weather when it is wild, not preferring things to be tame and constant. Here is how she explains it:

“THE ANIMALS AND the plants here on Cape Breton are hardy and fearless and playful and joyful. The wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it. They have the time of their lives in the winter, when the wind gets much stronger and there’s lots of ice and snow. They challenge the wind. They get up on the tops of the trees and hold on with their claws and then they grab on with their beaks as well. At some point they just let go into the wind and let it blow them away. Then they play on it, float in it. After a while, they’ll go back to the tree and start over. It’s a game. Once I saw them in an incredible hurricane-velocity wind, grabbing each other’s feet and dropping and then letting go and flying out. It was like a circus act. They have had to develop a zest for challenge and for life. As you can see, it adds up to tremendous beauty and inspiration. The same goes for us.”

As artists we tend to realize that all communication is imperfect translation, we go beyond the edge of things to find our personal lingua. It is a language that we forge with our heart and emotions to translate the uniquely embedded poetics in our blood. For me it is the clay, which by fire becomes the bronze. It is the metaphor of creation by the molten elements. Living in the cold and being thoroughly cold and being in the heat and being hot through and through is what consummates our desire to create.

Like a phoenix rising we are reanimated daily by our visions, our desires, our passion and our dreams.

I leave you with this thought, when we create we should realize that we cannot look back, the bridge is gone.

Gesso Cocteau

28 January, 2011

From My Notes on The Original Mother

I have just finished sculpting The Original Mother, a life-size piece that will be cast in the coming months. The sculpture is a symbolic gesture of our common ancestry. It represents a pursuit to unite people into the thread of humanity; to revolutionize the deepest meaning in our lives and to transmit a feeling of belonging and family. The Original Mother is a primordial motif where belonging is explored and the question we have asked for centuries, “What is my place in the universe?” is ruptured, dissected and examined. She is a model for forming a new family alliance in the oneness of humanity, a visual narrative of influence, going back in time and claiming our common ancestry to bring into the future.

When I first conceptualized The Original Mother I was asking the all-inclusive question, “Where do we come from?” This has been one of the paramount questions asked by humans for thousands of years. Although the question itself provokes numerous levels of thought, my idea in asking was not to segregate or fracture my answer by seeking organized religion solutions, but to have a discussion with myself about The Original Mother, and by wondering who she was in a pre argument, pre organized religion realm.

The world is a diverse place this is part of the separation that we feel. People come in different shapes and appearances, yet the genetic structure is not so different. Over 99% of the DNA in all people is identical. The remaining one percent is what accounts for our dissimilarity.

The Original Mother represents the oneness of human existence. She is the mythic image of the feminine principal. Our human alcove emphasizes brains over brawn; this is what gives us creativity and language, art and poetry, curiosity and social interaction. The Original Mother is a cellular memory, which I think we all have. She is a symbol of healing and unifying, the unification of mind, matter, soul and body, thinking and feeling intellect and intuition, reason and instinct. The Original Mother becomes a valid expression of the sanctity and unity of life. Not as a personalized image but a universal emblem a vision of life as a sacred whole in which all humanity is represented.

As an artist I am aware of the urgent need to comprehend the world as a unity. I have conceptualized The Original Mother to be the primal source of all humans. Mythic images are important on so many levels. Symbols and icons radically influence us both in our personal and in our collective life. If concurrent forces shape the cultivation of human culture than feral anthropology is scripted in ancient symbols all over The Original Mother. She is the aperture of human evolution.

For as long as people have existed we have struggled to know where we come from, to discover and define a universal truth. It is a personal journey with landmarks along the way. The journey is almost always plagued with hardships and also filled with an ineffable joy. But we are all in the grid together; despite our differences we do all share a common ancestry. Within this human tapestry I offer The Original Mother, a sculpture of unification.

If you would like a private viewing of The Original Mother before the casting process she will be in the studio until the end of February. The Original Mother will be a limited edition of three.

No photos will be posted until April 2011.

Gesso Cocteau 2011