Yearning (Tribute to Istine), 1997-2024

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When I was at art school (1982-3) I used to love going for walks in the Durban harbour area. And this is where I first saw the wood that I was to use for this piece, in one of the yards of a warehouse, but there was never anyone around to ask who the wood belonged to. The wood obviously came from a jetty or some such structure in the harbour as the pieces were well weathered and riddled with evidence of sea borer as their shells were still embedded in the holes they made. All of this spoke of the mysterious but inexorable passage of time.

Shortly after Istine and I were married (Dec 1985), I showed her the wood, still in situ in the harbour yard, that I had been coveting for the past couple of years. One day she came home very excited and told me she had driven past the wood in question and saw someone in the nearby shed and stopped and asked about the wood. We followed the person’s advice, and the rest is history.

I started carving this piece after my 1997 exhibition. At first, I carved the boat and the sphere as one piece with the prow of the boat-form connected to the sphere, but it just didn’t look right. Istine suggested I separate the boat-form from the sphere and then somehow integrate the boat and the sphere differently. This I did by having the boat cleave the sphere and that worked! Although I wanted something to happen on the other end of the base (which I had already made) where the house form is now, I was stymied as to what that ‘something’ should be. For years this unresolved sculpture stood abandoned on the veranda, until recently.

One night I manoeuvred the piece into a room of the house I use as a studio. I had a strong idea that a female figure, in some significant pose or other, should be positioned on the opposite end of the base from the sphere and boat-form. Only when I finally drew a female figure sitting on her haunches all hunched-up, looking forlornly towards the boat-form, with a cape wrapped tightly around her, did it dawn on me that a small house-form, with all its latent symbolism coming into play, could say so much more. It also created a poignant tension between the ‘house-end’ of the sculpture and the open invitation of another element of this sculpture, a set of stairs positioned in the stern of the boat-form. The seemingly insurmountable gap between the boat-form and the house can only be breeched by a certain leap of faith. And as I have already noted, the prow of the boat-form on this exhibition, will be directed towards the tempest of the awaiting ‘Propeller Cruciform.’

The day after making and attaching the house-form, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, 1948, appeared on my Facebook feed. The painting forces the viewer to see through the eyes of Christina, across farmlands to the house and barn, pleading with the viewer to understand the yearnings of the significant other and, in so doing, there can be an embracing/restoration of the attributes of the feminine psyche so maligned in my depiction of what would normally be the figure of Mary in Pieta: Ground Zero.