(Low-fire Terra Cotta, 9″ tall)
I’ve been following Andrew-Brady on deviantArt for some time. I ran across his piece, “Time and Tide”, and thought it would be a perfect piece to do as a sculpture.
What drew me to the painting was the sense of our smallness against the never ending rhythm of the tide and the unyielding current of time. The present slips away into the past, gone to all but our memory, even as the future continues to open to us.
Of course, nothing in life worth working for is ever easy.
This piece exploded in the kiln. I’m not sure what went wrong, but when I opened the kiln, I was greeted by a small pile of fragments. Rather than just throw out the pieces, I started slowly fitting them back together. Eventually, I was able to recover enough of the fragments, along with a bit of paper clay to fill in some of the gaps, and generally restored the figure to her original character.
Much as it is with my work, “Shattered“, this figure gains much of its character from the fact that it is shattered, and put back together. Time tries to break us apart into little pieces, but the Potter finds our pieces and puts us back together again. We are who we are, not so much in spite of our broken and cracked parts, but because of them.