Nike of Samothrace ,
the inspiration for my Nixë
text catalogue of sculptures by Trev Val dolphin
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| catalogue item number 27 |
based on the catalogue of the work's original showing....
This sculpture took some six months to develop from mental snapshot into
plaster form. The two subjects had been working together within a circle of
which I was a member, in an encounter group which I attended, exploring behaviour patterns.
On completion of their work, they shared a hug, and made what I saw as
wonderful and unusual shapes. Translating what I saw into a coherent form in my
idiom was a developmental process for me, in itself, and took a couple of
weeks to ferment. Then came the technical problems of how to make it. I
started in earthenware and got as far as the the lower legs of the woman
before I realised there must be easier ways than I'd used to make earlier
ceramic pieces. Casting a solid lump of plaster and then carving out what I
wanted seemed to be a better idea until I worked out the cost and weight of
the materials involved to work on the scale I wanted: life size or slightly
larger. Only days before I wanted to start construction 'live' at my first
solo exhibition, I hit upon the idea of using a polystyrene core which
works superbly. My future choice of plaster may not be the same, but I
enjoyed the technique so much that I'm sure I'll use it again. Awaiting a
suitably sized studio or exhibition venue to continue work 'live', I am
looking forward to making bronzes or castings in iron of this piece.
Nearly 12 years later, still hoping for that studio.... I forgot to mention that the maquette is shown on the front cover of the glossy catalogue I produced of my works in 1991, hence the text overlaying the image. I never actually did very much to promote them, after that though. That catalogue was a single handed exploration of the preparation for print process, in much the same way as this is an exploration of the world-wide-web publishing process. The text was set using my friend Jonathan How's Macintosh computer and the images produced on his mammoth of a process camera from my own prints. The text was printed out and the text and images pasted together, literally, on boards and handed to a printer, whose plate maker severely compromised my painstaking work by blowing-out all the highlights of the images, probably trying to hide the edges of the paste-up.... That was all done at Redfield Community. Jonathan How now runs the new agey publishing company Edge of Time, producing amongst other things, the definitive guide to UK Intentional Communities and another to nice places for off-beat events, plus an ever popular illustrated lunar calendar.
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| catalogue item number 30 |
based on the catalogue of the work's original showing....
December 1989 in Ardèche, France: my friend Mary Corr asked how I
would portray her as a sculpture in my idiom. I turned off my internal
censor and sketched my first imaginings in my diary and showed the sketch
to her: it was not very convincing but it was the essential form of the
sculpture that became Siège de Marie. Mary was a beautiful, powerful woman,
with a fascinating tension between her Roman Catholic convent upbringing and intense sensuality.
Our connection was our interest in humanistic psychotherapy.
Mary's large, soft, dark eyes live in that small gallery in my mind of those I will never forget.
I could not do justice to them in another medium, so she emerges from her womb with them closed.
Together with her equally irreproducible freckles and her wicked grin,
they were a guarantee that I would not be able to let go of the work.
I moved on down to Morocco for a few weeks and found the fascinating,
fibrous, washed-up bole of a palm on the beach. I began roughing out the
form, only to find that the core of the palm was home to a colony of termites.
But I'd made a clay maquette and moved the idea on a good bit....
Back in England, I searched for timber brought down by the severe gales of previous winters. The form matured during April, with detailed drawings but no suitable timber. A few days before I'd planned to leave for France again, the piece that would become the work turned up in one of the fields surrounding that old haunt of mine, Redfield. Most of the tree had been sawn into useless firewood, and it'd obviously been there a good while, as most of the bark had come off, exposing an entrancing 'lunar' landscape of silvery pinnacled, weathered wood. Just one sufficiently long piece remained where the chain-sawer had given up trying to penetrate the hard wood at the fork of a major limb. The cut left could be incorporated into the scheme - representing a work saving - the partial removal of the wood above the the seat of the piece. With help, I loaded the 80 kg lump into the van and removed it to a temporary location to trim it with chainsaw, wedges and chisels. Speculation as to the kind of tree it had been occupied me for weeks: wood soft and hard; brittle and pliable; wavy and straight, core pink and sap wood white but with a skin of pink, all of which combined to create the perfect niche in which to carve the figure. Quick growing with 56 rings across the seventy or so centimetres of its diameter, I suspected it might be aspen poplar for a long time, as I worked beneath one on a bank of the river Cèze.
In a warm, bright polytunnel at Plants For A Future, in Cornwall, sheltered from the summer showers and bathed in the perfume of masses of flowering basil, I continued with the detailing of some of the figure of Mary, using as a model my friend Helen who was a model for several well known artists. It was in that space that my friendship with Helen, every bit as intense as Mary, began to metamorphose into the most passionate and rocky love affair of my life, nevertheless enduring most of the intervening years.
Returning to that field in Buckinghamshire, and examining the fallen bark where my lump of wood had been, I was instantly able to compare it with the poplars under which I'd been working, and see it was flattened, not ridged. In a nearby hedgerow by a stream grey perfectly matching, storm-bashed white willows. I thought I'd almost finished the form by this stage, and was, literally, planning to polish it off ready for exhibiting in October, before going back to my retreat in France for a break from sculpting for a couple of weeks. I never learn: there is no such thing as finished: I do what seems like half of what is left to do, and then half of that which still remains, ad infinitum, yet there is never nothing left to do... I took it back to France with me to sand and detail. And still I was not ready to polish it for exhibiting. These rapid changes of climate caused problems for the timber: from wet English meadow to dry continental wind and sun. Splits widened and were filled, integrated or featured.
I finally exhibited Siège de Marie at a private viewing two days after I'd arrived back from the continent with it and two hours after I'd tidied up the last few bits that I was concerned about. I had long since lost any infatuation with the piece and got well back into doing 'my thing' solely out of commitment. Many adults were worried by it: they pulled faces and kept well away, or examined the detail with technical minds, occasionally asking the sort of questions that one answers with numbers. Often, adults, including myself in some moods, are so full of fear about sensuality that they do not seem to want to be seen encountering it, especially if, like Siège, it does not fit the narrowly defined limits of conventionality. Children not yet burdened with such taboos thus seem to see the attraction in my forms without tripping over such embarrassment or fear. So, anyway, I felt my work on Siège to be more validated by the attention it received from its small visitors clambering all over it and exploring it at the private view than by any distant adult's comment before or since.... Save perhaps the statement of handing over the considerable sum of money for it made by the purchaser, more money than I'd recieved for every work I'd sold up till then put together, confirming for me that I was now a professional artist and could thus forget about money for the rest of my life. Ha! I could have made as much money spending the same thousand hours stacking supermarket shelves, though admittedly not in such beautiful places.
Mary, teacher and psychotherapist, died of AIDS-related illnesses in, I think, 1993.
March 2002:
Kayti, one of those small visitors, having since grown into a beautiful young woman of 16,
full of life and energy and wisdom, grand daughter of Leafy, died in a fire at her home in Lincolnshire,
in February a few days before I began revising this manuscript for uploading its second edition.
I will remember her. Her younger brother, who was not born when the piece was made, was also badly injured.
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| catalogue item number 33 |
This work was taken without my consent around 1999: see below. Please contact me if you know of its whereabouts.
Carved from one of two logs of silver birch from a wood forming part of Hampstead Heath, London. The other log forms item 37, Leopard Table. You may recognise the lacelike pattern as the result of the beginnings of fungal decay. Remind me of the woodworker's technical term for this if you know it. Where neighbouring fungal colonies meet, they produce a dark interface which shows as a line where the timber is cut. Such wood is normally of little practical value as unless caught at an early stage, the structure of the timber is severely weakened by the fungus feeding on it. I took advantage of this weakening to more easily carve the otherwise hard material and impregnated the wood with thinned resins to restore its strength. The contrast between the mirror finish of her body and the raw chisel finish of her wings was very successful.
The name Nixë ( N ï x ë ) is a kind of familiar version of Nike as well as alluding to a similarly named fairy like creature. She was inspired by the ancient sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike, The Victory of Samothrace, residing in the Louvre. Samothrace is probably the most emotive fantasy based upon the human form I have ever seen, all the more powerful for her absence of head etc.
Nike of Samothrace ,
the inspiration for my Nixë
My humble tribute to the maker of The Victory of Samothrace hybridised with some mischievous elfin spirit, has caused more reaction per hour of time spent on her than anything I have yet made. She was first exhibited in 1992, at Simon Poulter's Nicht Gallery, attached to Redfield, where I was living and working. Several feminist women who were also living at Redfield took a strong dislike to her and jointly worked themselves up into a kind of crusade against my sometimes overt display of the vulva by draping a sheet over her before the private viewing of the collective exhibition. This resulted in a late night impromptu debate after the private view, around a log fire in the main hallway (image) of Redfield, in which perhaps 30 people took part. The debate ranged though the topics of whether my work was art or pornography, whether pornography could also be art and vice versa, and perhaps most importantly, whether art should be censored in some way, and if so, by whom.
Subsequently, I handed Nixë to a woodworker who was exhibiting his work in London and other places, with the intention of introducing purchasers to me, on the basis of a commission on the sale. Kym, the woodworker, and his girlfriend Rianne had actually introduced the buyer of Siège de Marie to me as a result of one of their exhibitions, and I regarded them as trustworthy. Kym, however was going through a down spell and I was abroad doing other things in the ensuing years, and the work was not sold. I then totally unexpectedly received a message telling me that Kym had died in an accident and that his lodger had commandeered many of his possessions, including his flat. Despite much telephoning and letter writing, there appeared to be nothing I could do to get the work back. Ultimately, the anguish of legal proceedings seems to be ridiculous, as I would rather just make a similar work and enjoy doing so rather than waste my life feeling bitter and fighting a battle over ownership and lining the pockets of others whose pockets I have just as little inclination to line. So, for now, I have the enjoyment of sharing just her image with you.
She spent much of her development with a swan's neck and head, but I was never totally satisfied with these, as they upset the proportion of her wings which, with their splendid natural markings, almost like some hawk's feathers, aspired to the Nike of Samothace's. So I amputated her neck and gave her instead an ancient-Egyptian-like deity's head, a small, scrolled, proboscis-like mask. This, one of the feminists found as provocative as her vulva, especially in juxtaposition with it! Strangely, the few pieces of the body of work represented by this catalogue that I have made an effort to sell have all been purchased by a very different kind of woman.... Anyway, Nixë represents an earthy female goddess, with power symbolised by her muscular legs and ... vulva, who has fallen to her knees while her spirit becomes a smaller, lighter creature but with still large wings aerodynamically appropriate to her bulk and mass. I prefer to think of her metamorphosing rather than emerging from the lower part of her torso to fly away.
She has the mask because I could give her no head that was appropriate to her archetype. I visualised her with a human head and she seemed merely a human. I visualised her with each of several animal's heads and she seemed merely an animal. So I have made her a spirit creature who simultaneously frightens and delights with her power....
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| catalogue item number 42 |
We now come to my last works of this period, during which upheavals of living situation, uncertainty about how to proceed and the resulting fragmented attention made it difficult for me to work creatively. (Maslow? would have taken this as an example of his hierarchy of needs....) The winter coldness and bleakness of the only spaces I had available to me to pursue these larger works also daunted me, such that in the end I gave up the attachment to such spaces almost completely, and consequently the works, and became mobile.
This work is one which has already developed its own character and merely uses my mind as a host, leaving me with a strong emotional connection, insisting that I complete it. The work represents the essence of the flight of the imagination. The taking of the most mundane of objects - here not even an object but the space and shadows between other objects - and breathing life and energy into them until they become the embodiment of a loved one. Hence a crack in the asphalt surface of a disused railway platform forming part of a walk on which I used to take a scatty collie dog while living in North London assumes the archetype of the esoteric semi-human beings who are the mediators between the god of a religion and ourselves. Being who I am, my angel has not a haughty demeanour and a trumpet, but is a snake-limbed high-kicking dancer with butterflies as her companions who sometimes amalgamate with her body. Her communications are nevertheless at least as important as any a more pompous envoy might deliver, if we but care to adjust our minds to them.
The three panels of the triptych are as follows. (Let us call them panels for want of a better word, since this triptych is intended to unfold rather than literally fold.) The first panel one encounters is hoisted onto a suitable wall, the apparently massive slab of asphalt as if cut like a geological model from the ground around the inspiration itself, but in which the crack is deepened and reveals upon close inspection a different quality to the external surface - a quality of life and potency. When one encounters the second panel, one finds the panel itself has crumbled to the floor in a pile of rubble and asphalt, heaving the bronze, snake-bodied woman poised with a single butterfly in the same posture in front of the wall to which she is connected only by her shadow. The third panel transcends not only two dimensions but three. In a darkened space one may enter with her, the holographic or projected angel, clearly recognisable as the same form, dances interactively around the viewer, entrained by a flotilla of butterflies. The colours, the textures, the patterns of the forms, as well as the sounds that accompany them and the subtle sensory characteristics of the space are all generated in the moment and interact with the observers, teasing and suggesting as well as responding.
You read the expression of the work written in the moments that I actually resolve some of its hitherto uncharacterised or unsuccessfully characterised aspects. Maybe you can help me with the when and where.
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edition 1: 2001, November 18th | ||