I call this new piece, Siren. For the longest time I thought of it as a mermaid but the more I looked at it and when I took the pictures for this post and for Etsy, the word siren kept coming to mind. So who care? Siren or mermaid, what's the big deal? To me, at least, there is an ethos about the piece that says,"I am a siren...beware!". In Greek mythology the sirens were birdlike women who lured sailors with their songs and caused them to crash on the rocky shore of their island.
sirens
On the other hand, mermaids,
have been portrayed as sinister in the past, today they have taken on a more benign presentation in popular culture. When I conjure up an image of a mermaid I think of the little mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen who caused misfortune more by ignorance than by malice.
When I took the pictures of my latest piece I began to see it more as a siren than a mermaid. Especially in the setting that I placed it in for the pictures. I could see a man being drawn in by her alluring gesture. If she could sing and I imagined her singing, she would captivate the way Melody Gardot can captivate with her singing.
What is interesting is that the carving is very small. It is less than six inches wide at the widest. It is only three inches deep and it is not more than six inches in height. Yet it seems to occupy a much larger space. It definitely has presence.
What I find interesting is that it all started as a piece of wood that I found bobbing on the shore during one of our walks along our beach. I guess my little siren captivated me one that day. I had no real plan for the wood when I found it. There was just something about it that I liked, the curve of the wood, the color, I really don't know. I just knew that I had to make something out of it. What it turned into was a siren.
No comments:
Post a Comment