Annie Details

Provenance

"Annie", 1993-2000. (Plaster before the now-completed bronze). 21"x58"x21".

"Annie" , named for my grandmother is one of a group of six entitled "Matriachal Series". It begins with my great-great-grandmother, Eliza Royal and rests for the present with my granddaughter, Emma. This group is a good demonstration of the way in which sculpture evolves in a formal fashion while simultaneously serving unrealized psychological demands. All the forms of the "Matriachal Series" are either from, or a development of, the "Life Sculpture" series made in approximately l983, which came about as an attempt to refine several of the somewhat clumpy forms of the earlier "Anotabulata" series. "Anolatabulata", a comprehensive work from 1976-79 based on the yin-yang subdivision of a cell made from two discs, displayed several shapes that had anthropomorphic overtones. Off and on over several years I played with variations on this theme, the pieces of "Life Sculpture" and of "God's Games" being two examples. In 1994, invited to make presentations at the Conference of the International Society for Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry (ISIS-Symmetry) to be held in Washington DC the following year, I prepared quite formal descriptions of the "Life Sculpture" work subsuming all the examples that would be presented in the associated exhibition under the descriptive title "Bi-cornuate". The following year while finalizing these plaster examples I was struck by the notion that I had converted to hard form ( resin, plaster, or bronze) a set that could be seen as a matriachal lineage and was compelled to assign appropriate names. This was an almost embarassing surprise for, while aware that art emanates from within, it is my belief that expressive content is made evident most effectively via the energy of the activity and the quality of the total oevre. I prefer the intellectual stimulation engendered by art with interesting and inventive formal qualities over that which serves as visual literature, and generally squirm when witnessing the personal revelations that are the basis of the biographical. Nevertheless it was a most interesting realization because while working with the earlier "Anolatabulata", almost completely unaware of family connections beyond my Mother and my own children, I had the sense that I was creating a family of forms. It seems that in l995, having in the interim discovered a few "roots", I was assigning forms to people. What next?