Revisioning Humpty Dumpty:
After Paul Nash's 'We are Making a New World. 1918

REVISIONING HUMPTY DUMPTY:
After Paul Nash's 'We are Making a New World. 1918

Dimensions: 33 X26 X 26 X 20cm

It’s essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory.

Art is the primary way in which this happens. It’s the primary way

in which we become what we see or hear.

Eugene H Petersen

For many reasons this will be a difficult sculpture to come to terms with. Perhaps, if one sees it as a marquette for a large outdoor sculpture it will make more sense and visualizing it as such, will bring into play its intended participation mystique. But let’s first examine the various aspects of this piece:

At a stretch of the imagination this sculpture represents the ubiquitous slit trench of WWI (note the characteristic sand bags shoring up its walls). On either side of the slit trench there stands a pollard tree. Nestled within the amputated limbs of each of the trees is a large fragile egg.

These two trees are a prayerful voice, tenderly countering the utter desolation caused by war, as witnessed in the Paul Nash painting with its sardonic title. The trees are pleading for a deep spiritual regeneration of all things in the newness of time.

From whatever direction or mindset you approach this monumental sculpture it will eventually dawn on you that you are in the so called no-mans-land of trench warfare: That area of hellish nightmares and carnage between two opposing systems of trenches, where many a young man screamed for his mother’s nurturing arms as he lay dying in the blood soaked muck and mire of war. And with these primordial screams resounding in the core of your being, you will look up and see that the monument has undergone an uncanny transformation and you begin to see it for what it truly is - slit trenches in warfare are not above the ground! No, this mound (protective womb) and its two egg-trees (ovaries and fallopian tubes) represent the generative organs of a female with steps inviting you up and into an all too familiar sanctuary where we all came into being and it is also a place of restoration and rebirth for those who care to pass through it.

Does anyone has suggestions as to where the above monument should be placed and please give reasons as to why you think it should be erected there?

And it is this feminine mystique that is much needed to offset the male jive: 

all the King’s horses and all the King’s men
 (collective male nous!) 

couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.