Sculpture

Rather than a discussion of the use of cast metal in this work, I would like to examine how I returned to bronze at this particular point in my own work. It was not cast bronze that had held my fascination as a child, it was the way in which Michaelangelo could evoke the powerful struggle of his unfinished slaves emerging from stone. My first view of the figures lining the galleria transported me at age nine; the agony and urge toward freedom resonated with my young view of justice. There seemed to be a perfect relationship between the material and the meaning of the work. It was a very short span of time before questions of form and function were a part of my vocabulary and my concerns as an artist. This perhaps accounts for, at least in part, the reason I did not pursue bronze as the medium for my visual investigations.

Thus it becomes a curious question of taking up a material once rejected as too hard, unyielding, indeed too cold for that which I wished to address in my work. Recently I found myself revisiting themes investigated years ago in two cycles of paintings, Loss of Faith and Final Judgment, which interwove Greek mythology with contemporary life. It was the image of Circe and her pigs, the easily seduced sailors, which reawakened the theme of transformation. It was not a huge leap to pick up a chunk of wax and envision it transformed into a solid hunk of bronze. It was very appealing that the change from the fluid, malleable softness of wax to the unequivocal state of hard, cold metal would reflect the process undergone by the subject of my work. That this was echoed in other lines of exploration, such as heads of Medusa who also evoked transformation through petrification, made the proposition of taking up cast bronze all the more relevant to recent work.

Further, it is no coincidence, I confess, that I had just returned from a visit to Greece where I was especially interested in the geometric pieces in the National Museum of Archeology. Classical achievement followed by a seeming disregard, a moving beyond which relates to materials in a more direct manner, is a constant cycle of overlay throughout art which intrigues me. The small, forthright figures captivated and spoke from an inner vision. When examined closely, these small bronzes inspire a deep respect for the artists' hand, almost a laying of hands with a power to pass through time and space.

So it has come to pass that an indifference to a material was transcended by the very characteristics which had differentiated the material from other sculptural processes. The very nature of the lost wax casting, the emergence of the new form in the weight of bronze, became the very attraction to the material. Thus, even the artist herself becomes transformed from one who disdains the quality of the medium, to one who relishes its emphatic statement.

Jan Wurm
Berkeley, October 2000