Maid of steel
My first impulse is to return to your soft, silky flesh. When soaking in the immediacy of our tactile dialogue, I stretch the clay viscosity between my fingers. But this piece, instead, calls upon a deep seated spirit. She is summoned in a dream.
In a sleep paralysis, I roam the urban grounds of an oppressive regime. Bodies are violated, children torn from their mother’s womb. In terror and resentment, my body dies, choosing to coexist parallel to the world - as a flying flock. I disperse into a murder of crows. How easy it is to annihilate the physical to calm an unbearable pain? How easy it is to self-harm to shield off the encroaching blade of an oppressor? The dream leaves me scarred for weeks, exposing the bones of flaming charcoal in the heart.
Pushing through the circuit of trauma, I seek a material that would challenge the cellular memory and transmute it. Clay responds. The body remembers. I’m clay. But moved by a distant voice in a dream which slowly catches up with reality, I’m clay and turn to steel. Clavum clavo expellere.
That same week I visit Homestead to only find out how whole Bulgarian villages immigrate there in the 1920's to work the steel factories. I’m reminded of my grandfather, an artisan himself who owns a metal shop and a foundry during communism. For which, he is prosecuted, deemed capitalist and thrown in jail. The whole facility - burned.
There are parts of me existing in a great distance, split through space and time. The part that I often consider awake, in this very reality, gets the message last. Likewise, I’m seized by the past. I do not know how that elemental force of metal has pushed her liquid body through the flames, wanting me to experience her violent ice while questioning my marriage with clay. I call upon the blessed spirit of my grandfather and take the journey to order 500 earth magnets and a wall size sheet of steel.
Plasma-cutting through the shape of a womb, a skull of humanity emerges. A crucifix commemorating the feeling of divine reverence to that which ever-changes and gives but also takes - the force of life and nature. To my ancestors, to all that is before and after, all that makes me big and grounds me small, all that is and has been and would continue despite my audacity to describe it and express in form. To that which emerges from the fibres of the creative process and transmutes the hand of suicide into the hand of a surgeon mending the broken pieces of a heart. Steel I stand.
Process outline for Perpetually elemental - 90” X 90’’ cut and formed steel plate, comprised of two pieces, assembled on burnt plywood shadow forms. Part 2
