new work in studio - small figures

On Saturday I ended up breaking up and abandoning three projects in the studio.

Yesterday I went to the studio to start sketching ideas. I had no intention of making anything. On my walk on Sunday I remembered my fascination with the Eye Idols of Tell Brak in Syria. The intention was simply to start by sketching these from memory and work towards an idea of my own based on them.

I had also had an idea of making a series of small sarcophagi for street cutlery (cutlery collected from the street).

So I started sketching.

The initial sketches above were relatively close to the images of idols I'd previously researched. I did quite like the thin form in the bottom left because it looks like a Hattifattener from Tove Jansson's Moomin books. But it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

I began thinking about other ritual objects that I might draw from. My first thought was that something like a canopic jar might be an interesting variation on both the eye idol and the sarcophagus - see below left.

That struck me as a bit cheesy. I didn't immediately abandon the idea of incorporating street cutlery. I did think about reducing or removing the eyes.

In the bottom right corner of the second set of sketches immediately above you can see that another idea has begun to emerge. This was intended to incorporate street cutlery in a way similar to African nail fetishes.

As I haven't really done any research of these fetishes and didn't have much idea what they look like off the top of my head this idea ended up confined to just a couple of sketches. But there seemed to be potential for arms on the form, whether supporting street cutlery or not.

I simplified the form, adding arms to a basic eye idol form. I then simplified it further by removing the eyes.

The image top right in the last set of sketches above shows a sudden breakthrough. I remembered the poetry of Victor Segalen, particularly his Stèles. Most specifically the description of his writing in The Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820-1950 by William Rees:

The Stèles are based on the Chinese literary and religious tradition of the epigraph inscribed on a stone pillar, which has a round hole through which the eye of the sky may see.

No further detail or references for these pillars are provided. In any case I didn't have the book with me, and had never seen one of these pillars. They existed to me mainly as an image in my mind.

So in that top right sketch I tried to incorporate what I thought one of those holes might look like. I also extended the sides to exclude the arms. Then I sketched the form again - bottom left above. I had a form I was happy with.

I've made a couple of forms from clay now and will photograph them shortly as long as they manage to hold up.

As a final note it was only this morning that I realised I hadn't seen one of the pillars carrying an epigraph and a hole. A quick search didn't find a lot actually. The image above taken from Buddhist Art News - here was the first I found. It is not from China but from Trincomalee in Sri Lanka.

After five and half hours on Saturday that produced nothing, I only spent around an hour on the sketches and completing the first form yesterday.