greg metcalf ritual art

Where these came from

These sculptures arose out of a simple case of nkisi envy. A friend brought one of the Congolese ritual sculptures to dinner and I wanted one. I went out the next day and bought wood and blades and started making my first nkisi.

My first response to the nkisi was a visceral aesthetic response: the aged wood and rusted nails, the sense of a history seen in materials added over time. But I also responded to the idea of a figure representing someone on the next plane of existence who might intervene for me, the honouring of an ancestor and asking for help through the ritual acts of feeding and driving mbau (the nails and such) into the figure.

At the same time I had been voraciously reading world mythology -- from Gilgamesh and the Niebelung myths to the Nag Hamadi, the Mahabarata, Native American Raven stories and the fairy tale collections of Victorian England. The common threads of these stories quickly emerge, as does the underlying pattern of historically factual local heroes who became cultural exemplars and, eventually, supernatural beings who could act on behalf of those who remembered them. And yet these compelling stories seemed to be presented as being irrelevant to our scientific world, for the less sophisticated, of the past, of the primitive. As I finished my first nkisi (of the artist Joseph Cornell) I realized I was making an art of the present that looked at our world through the mythologizing lens of ritual. And there wasn’t much difference.

The sculptures in this show mainly represent cultural heroes who I -- or others -- would like to honour and to have intervening somewhere. As I’ve expanded beyond the model of the mnkisi to other ritual objects like ceremonial rattles and memory boards, I’ve also begun to incorporate forms from Asian and European cultures. Still these works are most strongly inspired by the place of art in African ritual.

Process and Materials

With the exception of the Divination Boards (which are carved from pine), all of these pieces are carved from basswood with additions of found objects, especially rusted metal, and mirrors. The surface patination is an adaptation of forgers techniques, with the initial colour created through a blend of stains and shoe polish that is then “aged” by applications of assorted libations -- "feedings" -- before and after being buried in various dirts and clays.

Mnkisi

There are certain formal conventions for the nkisi (mnkisi is plural). The sculpture -- sometimes called a “power figure” -- is posed with one arm raised, brandishing a weapon and has a medicine packet -- sort of a “mojo” -- behind a mirror in its belly. This magic is released by driving nails (mbau) into the body, sometimes with notes or identifying objects attached.

Certain personal conventions have developed. I was told that the sculptures had to have genitals to “work,” so the males are dressed above the waist in the clothing of their time, below in the naked timelessness of dream. The mirror which covers the mojo has been encased in a box which contains a distilled “portrait” of the figure. Some of the figures end up with mirrors for eyes and most of the figures end up with face markings, a forehead symbol drawn from a variety of traditions and the seers among the group also bear the traditional eye circles and nose line of the shaman.

The female figures have developed incorporating many of these same conventions, except the top half of the body is also initially exposed, using the breasts as a signifier of female power (the traditional balance to the exposed penis of the males), with the hands generally reinforcing the breasts rather than being raised in the male gesture of threat. Following another traditional African presentation, Mbau are not driven into the females, instead they are invoked through addition of materials -- through wrapping, tying, painting and inscribing. For reasons unclear to me, the mirror boxes of the female mnkisi I create have round mirror boxes in contrast to the square boxes of the males.

Albert Barnes -- an art scholar’s nkisi
Barnes was a collector and scholar of modern and African art and design in all it’s forms. His weapon is a well-designed set of workman’s calipers -- invoking his roles as museum-builder and comparative critic, as well as the functional forms he juxtaposed with traditional art in his museum., and under his other arm he holds either an African mask or a mask based on a Picasso painting, both from his collection. His box presents the emotional heart of his museum, the dance mural he commissioned from Matisse. Private Collection -- Commission

Samuel Beckett -- an existentialist perseverance nkisi

Samuel Beckett waits amidst absurdity. In his right hand he brandishes a fountain pen. In his left he holds a working pocket watch with a broken crystal and only one hand. His box presents the set of the second act of Waiting for Godot -- an empty moon in a mirrored sky watches over a bone that stands as a dead tree with plastic leaves growing from it. Among the mbau driven into Beckett are a few typewriter keys, tape machine buttons and recording tape, invoking Krapp’s Last Tapes and the broader act of attempting to remember and edit sense out of a life, words cannot be created and have no meaning anyway.

Joseph Campbell -- an essentialist nkisi
Mythology scholar Campbell is invoked in communicating the core truth in the the chaos, the articulation of the stream through the mire. Campbell’s mirror box contains the endless multiplication and transparency of the realities of myth. In his right hand Campbell brandishes a larger, but flawed, representative of that inner expansive vision. In his left hand holds a Green Man mask, a traditional European representation of the endless and inevitable cycle of life. His forehead bears the symbol of authority.

Mary Cassatt -- a perseverance nkisi
Artist Cassatt stands for the triumph over unrecognized adversity to create. Her hair (traditional European symbol of female passion) is held in place by the tools of the painter and the engraver. Her mirror box contains the image of the child from Cassatt’s painting of The Boating Party. (While this child is usually interpreted as being amused at the attention of the threatening adult male who stares at her as her mother looks away, in isolation the child’s discomfort at her situation becomes more clear.) Attached to a raffia cord around Cassatt’s waist are dried flowers (European symbol of past beauty and happiness) and sea shells (African symbol of the eternal). Her forehead bears the Adinkra crescent moon of patience and determination. Her body is covered with traditional symbols invoking patience, binding, grandeur, magnanimity, humility, excellence and wisdom.

Jack Clarke
Clarke is presented with the attributes of his different “selves” in balance. His professional sides are represented by the scales of (legal) justice and his telephone (engineer’s) hardhat. (The raised right hand traditionally holds the figure’s brandished weapon which can be used for protection or attack.) These are balanced by the hightop sneakers, basketball (which can be used for offense or defense) and the Hawa’iian “Aloha” Shirt, representing more avocational pursuits.
The abundance of “mbau” (nails/etc) in the figure represent his power or, alternately, the large number of requests for assistance he has received over the years. Attached to some of the mbau are symbols of assistance (the hand), balanced insight (the paired eyes), and Florida (the shell).
Behind the mirror in the belly is the “heart” of the figure, the medicine pack which empowers it. The mirror box which holds that which is closest to his heart, Clarke’s grandchildren.
Private Collection – Commission

A Double Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) -- a perpsective nkisi
Doubleness is natural in the life of Twain/Clemens and he stands for balance amidst chaos. He never succeeded without failing or failed without succeeding. Here the young Clemens/Twain looks into the future, the old Twain into the past. The young lecturer brandishes his writer’s pen in raised hand, holds the celebrity’s cigar at his side. The old victorian gentleman brandishes the cigar, the pen is secondary. But pen and cigar and inseperable, just as the old gent’s white suit and the young hellion’s black suit bleed from side to side. The young man’s mirror box holds the money which he pursued; the old man’s contains the image of young womanhood which was his lifelong ideal, became his lost daughter Suzy, and is embodied here in the form of a coin. Private Collection

Joseph Conrad -- a cross-cultural literary nkisi
Writer Conrad represents the pursuit of tragic wisdom, the artistic rendering of savagery which lay just beneath the veneer of civilization. In his right hand he brandishes a blooded spear made of a horseshoe crab tail with a “cat-of-five-tails” end of spines that has drawn blood and ink. In his left, Conrad holds the book of incomprehensible scientific law from Heart of Darkness now leather bound and unreadable. His mirror box obscured by haze and grease, also invokes that novel as it presents an ivory white sphere surrounded by Victorian maps of the the area around London, the oft-fogotten heart of darkness of the title. His forehead bears a symbol of authority.

Joseph Cornell -- an artistic nkisi
The first nkisi, artist Cornell intervenes on issues of sculpture of the assemblage of the unnoticed into the artistic. In his right hand he brandishes a pair of scissors (representing his collage work). His left hand hold his mirror box which is the distilled essence of one of his artistic boxes -- the sphere and the hanging ring. Assorted materials adhere to Cornell’s head as he has been fed for a long time.

Walt Disney -- a money through art nkisi
Businessman Disney represents the possibility of financial success through art. In his right hand Disney brandishes a no. 2 pencil on which he has speared dollars. His left hand holds a Mouseketeer cap to cover his nakedness, but his displaced penis returns in his mirror box as a stack of pennies crowned by the ubiquitous mouse ears, dusted with powdered sugar. His forehead bears a traditional
symbol for money. His mbau offer found coins to him.

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) -- a creative sublimation nkisi
Dodgson appears as the armour of the White Knight from Alice’s Adventure through the Looking Glass, a character who seems an endearing and sad self-portrait of the author. Dodgson brandishes a lance of oversized chivalry. Attached to the figure are the novel’s props, also carried by the Knight. Opening the door in Dodgson’s armour reveals his photographic portrait of Alice Liddel -- closest to his heart,

but in a position which means that Dodgson can only see her through the looking glass built into the door in his armour. This might be seen to represent an abstract consideration of distancing through representation, a reconstruction of the inverted image of Alice that Dodgson would have seen through his camera or simply a srange but practical solution to the problem at hand in the manner of both Dodgson and his knight. Private Collection

Max Ernst - a healing/shaman nkisi
Ernst is presented in full shamanistic mode, in the “magician” role he took on after his resurrection from the initiatory “death” of World War I. The form of the nkisi is loosely inspired by a Bembe figure with prominent feathers which allude to a breeze or spirit (mpeve) in the original, and signify it’s power residing in a powerful breath inside the figure. (This figure receives its power from both a trapped breath and a traditional medicine pack in different cavities.)

The detachable feathered robe is inspired by one Dorothea Tanning created for Ernst, but it has been altered to allude to traditional shaman robes with the use of the cosmological metal circle and “chains” (and metal pieces arranged to represent a bird skeleton to be taken on by the shaman.). During the shaman’s “death” his body was torn apart and, at the end, it was reassembled. This ritual also echoes Ernst’s collage techniques and the “reassembled” quality of the body is intended to capture that spiritual reality as well as the aesthetic of Une semaine de bonte.

The part-bird, part-man elements also refer to the ritual paradox of the simultaneous presence of the shaman and his totem (in Ernst’s case, the eagle). The figures on the sides of the nkisi originate with the “birdman” tradition from from Easter Island. The bird figure is often presented holding an egg, which is represented inside the circular mirror box,

with a hole to suggest the possibility of the “interior of sight.”

The face of the mirror box is a whitened circle alluding to the sun/artist’s eye in Ernst’s forestscapes of the the later 1920s. Beneath the circle is a plant/fertility form drawn from one of Ernst’s Loplop-themed paintings. The tail feathers are inscribed with autobiographical notations in Ernst’s private alphabet. The simple painted areas on the back of the nkisi are intended to invoke Ernst’s collected kachina figures, with a “face” created by a quote from Ernst’s Of this Men Shall Know Nothing.

This nkisi is also designed to address back problems, with a spine created out of the “epsilon-birdprint” form which also happens to make the transition from “EM” to “ME” (as in, “Evan Mauer” and “Max Ernst”) as it goes through the shamanistic seven step journey toward the mystery (if one rises toward the cosmological) or the physical (if one descends toward the dancing figure made of epsilon/birdprints). (These epsilon/birdprints also arise from Ernst’s artwork.) Here the spine is reinforced by the physical (the bone) and the metaphysical (the brush), held in place with a copper wire that approximates a traditional shaman’s copper breastplate and the practice of binding the shaman’s body as his spirit journeys.
Private Collection -- Commission

Sigmund Freud -- a structuralist nkisi

Cultural critic Freud is invoked in issues of seeing relations, buried structures and hidden connections. Freud’s mirror box is dominated by the floating eye of judgment of the elders, guilt reconstructed from William Blake’s painting of Adam (the judged becomes judge). Archetypically Victorian, Freud contorts to cover his nakedness while brandishing the displaced penis in the phallus of his greatly oversized cigar (the question mark brand alluding to the question of whether a cigar is, sometimes, just a cigar). Attached mbau packets and milagros refer to deeper sight, second sight and healing vision. Private Collection

Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) -- a childworld nkisi

Creator Geisel stands for creativity given to adults in the service of children. In his right hand Geisel brandishes a complicated Dr. Seuss machine for identifying or writing. In his left he holds the hat of the Cat in the Hat. In his mirror box is the little piece of fuzz on the pink thistle, home of the overlooked Hoos of Hooville in Horton Hears a Who. For obvious reasons, Geisel’s mbau are crayons.

Steve Goodman -- a life nkisi
Musician Steve Goodman was, obvious though it may appear, a genuinely good man and he embodies life lived in balance. In the face of inescapable death he remained inspirationally amusing. In a cutthroat business, he was a kind and supportive colleague. His music was a product of who he was, so he is the instrument he plays. He was what he appeared to be and his mirror box can add nothing to clairifying who he was. He used to wear Hawaiian shirts. His forehead bears the symbol of the ability to face difficulty in life.

Edward Gorey -- an illustrator’s nkisi

Edward Gorey was a retro-Victorian surrealist illustrator. He is presented in his most typical self-portrait attire of a self-obscuring, expansive and cross-hatched fur coat. Accentuating the artist’s self-concealment, Gorey brandishes no weapon; his hands are hidden in his pockets. Though naked under the coat, his genitals are not revealed. However, emerging from the coat is The Doubtful Guest, the title creature from an early Gorey book which stands as Gorey’s prefered revelation of himself and is redundantly phallic enough to empower the nkisi. The Guest also brandishes a traditional crowquill pen. Gorey wears the Guest’s hightop sneakers. Private Collection

George Herriman -- an art in popular forum nkisi
Herriman was one of the great, largely ignored, Surrealists as his work took the form of a comic strip -- Krazy Kat -- for the Hearst newspaper chain. Central to the strip was a romantic triangle between Krazy (a cat in love with a mouse), Ignatz, the mouse in question (who responds to Krazy’s interest by throwing bricks which Krazy takes as a sign of Ignatz’s love), and Officah Pup (who may be in love with Krazy or may just enjoy jailing Ignatz). Herriman’s weapon takes the form of Ignatz, having just thrown one of the ambiguous bricks, being supplied by Krazy who is about to be interrupted by Pup. The box represents the setting of the strip, Herriman’s version of his own neighborhood near Monument Valley (the source of the sand in the box). The broken mirror-sky is intentional, a visual punning on Herriman’s conceptual frame-breaking and a suggestion of where the brick Ignatz tossed might have landed.

Harry Houdini -- an escape nkisi
Escape artist Houdini embodies both the idea of escape and the idea of trapping oneself. His arms cross through his mirror box, locking them in place. Houdini is girdled with chains of locks and keys, captivity with release imminent. The mbau for Houdini are keys and the plethora of keys, more than the locks, hold him. His mirror box contains a ball and chain. His forehead bears the symbol of the key. Private Collection

Melanie Klein -- a healing nkisi
Psychotherapist Klein suggests the possibility of wholeness. Her mirror box contains the sphere split into black and white, representing her view that we learn as children to defend ourselves by creating artificial extreme figures to stand for all the good and all of the bad. She makes with her hands a raffia cat’s crade which holds the symbol for psychological knowledge, which also marks her forehead. The same raffia is used to bind parts all manner of fragments -- and Klein -- together, with the traditional American fortune cookie fortunes of healing and productivity, the milagros of the healed heart, and packets of binding and blending.(After extensive feeding, Klein is largely obscured.)

Rene Magritte -- a
surrealist nkisi
Painter Magritte is invoked to see the ordinary mystery of life as well as its mysterious normality. His right hand brandishes a carved pipe with real tobacco inscribed with the warning that this is not a pipe. His left hand holds a bowler hat behind his back. The apple that might more properly appear in the mirror box appears on his shoulders. The head that might more properly appear on his shoulders appears in a sphere in the mirror box (full head shot and profile), amidst a rain of
bowler hatted men in topcoats. Private Collection

Henri Matisse -- a childlike wonder and skill nkisi

Matisse is presented in a variation of the pose of one of his most substantial figure paintings, Nude Man (1900). He brandishes a pair of children's scissors and conceals a bouquet of cut out coloured paper plant forms behind his back. His belly box holds an image of Cezanne's Three Nudes (c. 1882), the painting Matisse carried with him as his inspirational icon.

Edvard Munch -- an anxiety nkisi
Munch’s selfportrait “in hell” is reproduced in his box, while the nkisi itself is modeled on the figure from Munch’s Shriek (another self-portrait by Munch). Mbau on his body allude to anxiety causes and to anti-anxiety treatments.

Vladimir Nabokov -- a precision nkisi
Nabokov’s central obsessions were language and butterflies. In both cases, a delicate and precise touch (hence the tweezers) were necessary in the pursuit of his elusive (and allusive) quarry, across fields or languages (note the actual butterfly out of reach on his head). Word and image overlap in the butterfly of printed words in his box. Creator and creation, pursuer and pursued also overlap in the form of Nabokov who -- with typewriter key mbau in his back takes the form of a butterfly. His pursuit is also suggested by the trenchcoat, although some may interpret that as the requisite equipment for an exhibitionist, a suggestion of sexual perversion associated with Nabokov’s best known novel Lolita. Typewriter key mbau are both English and Russian letters. Private Collection

Jackson Pollock -- a creative intensity nkisi
Pollock is seen in the act of creating, concentrating downward as he dances the line onto one of his “drip paintings.” The brandished paintbrush is inseparable from the line of paint which is the painting. in his left hand he holds a can of paint and cigarette, he wears a t-shirt. In his box we see the myth and alternate myths of Pollock’s life. A photo of young Jackson as Cowboy stands over a mini desert of actual powdered deer bone. crossing the photo is Pollock’s Blue Poles which is echoed in the fence line which runs along the front of the box. Partially concealed by the fence is a rolling sphere -- on one side is Pollock’s anguished early self-portrait, on the other side is darkness. Private Collection

Elvis Presley -- a celebrity nkisi

Presley is shown in his 1950s form, complete with pompadour and curled lip. The King brandishes the weapon of his microphone. In his box we find his mother, surrounded by the label of his first 45, for the Sun (son) label: That’s All Right (Mama). Mbau on his body include heart-shaped locks (invoking the rooms at Heartbreak Hotel). Presley’s mother presides over the keys to these locks, hanging inside the box.

John D. Rockefeller -- a greed nkisi
Rockefeller is presented as an emaciated man fixated on acquisition. His eyes, ears, palms and genitals are all mouths needing constant feeding. His box represents his essence as another hungry mouth. As does the largest mouth at the top of his head (under a raffia toupee). Significantly, his actual mouth is tightlipped, giving nothing away.
This nkisi most clearly presents the split traditional meaning of mnkisi -- they embody both positive and negative powers and traits, often at the same time. Greed, the desire to acquire, is both negative trait and necessary motivation.

Egon Schiele -- a sublimation nkisi

The Viennese Expressionist painter who brought the psychological dissection of van Gogh's self-portraits to the nude, Schiele is presented in the attenuated form of one of his full-body self portraits, as a figure who channels his sexual energies and anxieties into a creative force. Penis and pencil have become interchangeable. His belly box contains an image of his sister, Gertrude.
Institutional Collection

Gertrude Stein -- a philosophical nkisi
Gertrude Stein blends male and female traditional forms as her body suggests power and fecundity, fertility and threat both implied by the pose. Her earlobes are slightly enlarged to suggest certain Southeast Asian images of the Buddha. Her mirror box contains half a real rosebud (the real) and half its reflection (the image), invoking in its potentiality the idea of realization. Under her left arm, Stein holds the textual suggestion of the limits of art (a word can only suggest itself) and its antithetical liberation (but each word-rose is not the same as each other and, together, they suggest something far more than the word rose). In her right, she brandishes a rose which is not a rose, a carved rose which is also a pen. (Although the pen is not really a pen, but a sculpture. But if we accept it as a pen, it is not functional, because of the thorns. Alternately, it is a functional pen, but words can only be written if the author is willing to suffer to do it.) Private Collection -- Commission

Wayne Thiebaud -- a playful creativity nkisi

Wayne Thiebaud, the painter of sensual intense colour paint stroked depictions of everyday comfort food brandishes an overloaded paintbrush dripping with "icing" from his layer cake palette. His hair is turning into the shape of thick paint strokes. His torso holds a gumball machine filled with multi-coloured gumballs. His mbau-attached emblems relate to the subjects of his paintings, his heart, his eye and his dextrous hand.
Private Collection -- Commission

Warren Zevon – a perseverance/acceptance of
mortality nkisi
Zevon is presented as a boxer, at the end of a fight, with his hands still taped and bloodied, (alluding to his creative persona most explicit in his song title, Piano Fighter, and, perhaps, to his father’s influential though short career as a professional boxer). Zevon’s cocked eyebrow suggests the ironic attitude that completed his persona. Zevon’s torso juxtaposes the death’s head in a mirror box with the virility of a rock guitar neck and strings. The mbau refer to Zevon’s ironic dance with death throughout his life and work and the cigarettes/lung cancer which finally killed him.                           Private Collection

Chuck Jones                                             Philip K. Dick

Ernest Hemingway                            Franz Kafka

F Scott Fitzgerald                                    Maurice Sendak

Bram Stoker                                             Alfred Hitchcock

Dante Aligheri

Marshal McLuhan

Jack Kerouac

Edgar A Poe

Wm Shakespeare

HP Lovecraft

Frida Kahlo

Hunter S. Thompson

Gourd Woman Mnkisi

The Buli-style "Bowl Figure” or “Gourd Woman" form (called that because the squatting woman holds a bowl or gourd) traditionally is one of the offering of food to guests.

Kathe Kollwitz -- a Mourning Nkisi
Kollwitz, the German expressionist artist who captured the stark and depressing realities of war (including the death of her children) after World War I, holds no bowl. Instead, she contemplates a pile of ashes she holds in her hands. The ashes imply both her charcoal drawing and the desolation she transformed and rendered in her art. The general form of Kollwitz is drawn from the Buli-style "Bowl Figure” or “Gourd Woman" form (called that because the squatting woman holds a bowl or gourd).

Sojourner Truth -- a Perseverance Nkisi
Truth, a champion of the slow struggle toward abolition, holds no bowl. Instead, in her two hands she holds a rusty chain with a partly opened link. It is unclear whether it is opened far enough to break the chain. She contemplates the chain as she continues to pull it apart. Private Collection -- Commission

Albert Einstein -- a Wonder Nkisi

Non-Mnkisi Ritual Sculpture

Boccio

A boccio is a non-Freudian talking cure figure, but also a scary figure in need of binding. You speak your fears into the holes in the object and then replace the pegs to hold them in. Location relates to meaning of the fear. It is carried by its owner.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson is about being true to oneself. The imagery of this boccio is drawn from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance: "Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not."
Emerson stands upon the water unmoved, even as it flows.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.The sailing ship sails in a zigzag pattern as it navigates a straight line. Hence the ship sailing zigzag toward the golden star.
The compass Emerson holds can point toward magnetic north if the boccio is turned on its side, or it will point wherever the owner wants it to if the boccio stands vertically.
Emerson’s facial features are a combination of the man at different times of his life, and different moods. From different angles and in different lighting, the figure becomes younger, older, happier and more severe. Private Collection – Commission

Meta Warrick Fuller
Meta Warrick Fuller is about healing and restoration. The African American artist's form references her sculpture, The Awakening of Ethiopia. with the ability to treat concerns of the body and the mind.
Private Collection

Man Ray
Man Ray is about seeing, hence the prominent eyes. Bound to his back are polarized attribute/ offerings -- black and white (noire et blanche), film negatives and bones, modern and primitive, artifice and essence, image and substance, death and life. They are bound to Man Ray -- and he is bound -- by his favourite neckware, a shoelace.
Private Collection

Edward O. Wilson
Edward O. Wilson developed theories of natural order and systems based in biology. He also wrote on the social structure of ants, which became a model for far broader issues. The sphere he holds is his symbol of “consilience,” a unified theory. As the chains of silver and gold ants climb up the handle they form DNA strands. Ariadne the silver spider navigates the maze at the pediment, another metaphor of consilience.
Private Collection -- Commission

Martin Luther/Sigmund Freud Boccio

Luwe Figures

A luwe figure is a representation of the hunter standing atop his prey, and suggests the inseparability of the two.

William Blake on a Tyger
William Blake is the mystic/ artistic hunter astride his poetic Tyger (best known for “burning bright”). This sculpture is equally informed by elements of South Asian ritual art (the flaming image of enlightenment) and the use of gold and red elements. The facial features of Blake also draw on the generalised representations seen in a body of Greek-influenced Indian Buddhist representations. Private Collection

Pablo Picasso on Guernica Horse
Pablo Picasso is the cubist artist atop a screaming horse who brings the light of truth in his left hand and carries the killer spear of the paintbrush in the right (the artist stares into truth in the pregnant moment before he “kills” the living moment by fixing it forever in paint. the brush, stabbed through the horse will become the spear we see in the painting.

Jean Giraud (Moebius) on a Pterodactyl

Divination Board

The Divination board of various African cultures traditionally bears a representation of the trickster and related attributes around the border. Saw dust is poured on the central space and intimations of the future are revealed in the patterns that emerge.

Freud and Jung Divination Board Sigmund Freud and his science (represented by “psi symbols”) are balanced by Carl Jung and his mythological. Freud is surrounded by variations of the “Psi” symbol blending into Jung’s mythological figures of balance. In reflection of Freud’s Psi is Jung’s Tree of Life, leading off to traditional African (mythological) arrangements of (Freudian) symbolically male snakes and female spiders intertwined in shapes representing infinity, the past and the future. The median border space is marked by yin-yang symbols suggesting Jungian balance of opposition or Freudian balance of eros and thanatos. Private Collection

Marx Brothers Divination Board
The Marx Brothers Divination Board presents five tricksters and their attributes on the border. Groucho and cigars, Chico and piano keys, Harpo and his ahOOga horn, and Gummo and Zeppo (the interchangeable and overlapping straightbrothers) and their respective gum-soled shoes and Zeppelin dirigible namesakes.

Memory Board

Memory boards are used in traditional Luba culture to record histories of a community, including relationships to other villages and key leaders. This appears in both bas relief carving on one side and patterns of coloured beads on the other.

Raymond Chandler Memory Board
This memory board records the root influences on Raymond Chandler’s writing. Chandler’s head tops the board. On it’s face, we see the major influences of Kit Marlowe, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Black Mask authors Earle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett. At the center is the central influence of Joseph Conrad.
The reverse contains two abstract representations in beads positioned on a rectangle: The lower section represents the same authors with coloured beads representing key works and the relationships between authors. The upper section presents Chandler’s geographic lifeline on the right, the short stories and novels of Chandler on the raised center, and major influences on specific works on the left. Bead colour represents related themes between Chandler’s life and writing.

Ceremonial Trappings

Modernist Academic’s Ceremonial Rattle

This rattle is loosely based on rattle used in Congolese manhood initiation rituals. Here the rattle is intended to be shaken over scholarly writing. (The rattle, like so much scholarly publication, makes very little noise). By doing so, the user invokes those creators of the Modern intellectual world -- Karl Marx (with a chain of dollar signs), Sigmund Freud (with a chain of “Psi” symbols), Charles Darwin (with a chain of DNA), and Albert Einstein (with a chain of atoms).
Private Collection

Marge/Maggie Simpson Ceremonial Staff
In Yoruba fashion (both in concept and form), the staff presents the progression from matriarch to most recent progeny -- matriarch at the top of the staff, progeny at the bottom -- as a statement of continuity, underscored here by the interchangeability of Margaret (Marge) and Maggie (Marge). Marge’s dyed hair incorporates a Yoruba pattern and an indigo staining seen elsewhere. Maggie is shaped to suggest a similar Yoruba base.

The reverse of Maggie presents the cartoon child in abstracted form.
Private Collection

Ceremonial Adze

Traditionally, the blade of the adze stands as the oversized tongue of a figure who serves as the handle of the adze.

Teddy Roosevelt Adze
Roosevelt -- who advised that one should speak softly but carry a big stick -- is represented as that stick, but one with a biting tongue like that of the president who used his public speaking to persuade so often that he came to refer to his presidency as a bully pulpit. Roosevelt is seen with sleeves rolled up and jacket off, thumbs in his vest holding a 19th century pose of masculine confidence. Roosevelt stands upon a bear (as in “Teddy
Bear”) who faces the opposite direction.

Bob Marley Vessel

Ritual Instruments

Bob Dylan Thumb Piano
Bob Dylan presented as a religious figure, wearing a golden skull that accentuates the actual size of his skull as opposed to the large nimbus of his hair halo (a minor meditation of image and authenticity). As in the traditional form of a Congolese sanza, Dylan’s robe creates the bell shaped hollow body of the thumb piano.

Martha Graham Bell
A Zande-style wooden bell in the abstracted form of modern dancer Martha Graham. The simplified arc and detailing of the bell “body” is meant to invoke Graham’s angular modernity in general and the Appalachian Spring dance and hands held in a prayerful position in specific.

Billie Holiday Standing Thumb Piano
Inspired by a traditional Zande sanza (lamellaphone) form, Holiday is show standing, arms thrown up, head thrown back in song. The keys of the sanza are placed on her hollow torso. The figure is abstracted to a point where it barely resembles Holiday, but the carpet tack hair and simplified forms seem worth the effort. And the large magnolia blossom behind her

ear serves as a signifier of Holiday.

Lyle Lovett four-stringed instrument

Bells

Dog Bells

The form is a traditional form for a Dibu wooden dog bell. When fully functional, three clappers extend beyond the body of the bell although they are not attached to these pieces.

Paul Gauguin
Gauguin sits atop a bell that repeats two of his

works, the painting of Vision after the Sermon and the 1890 carved panel from Tahiti, “Be Mysterious.” ,The first embodying Gauguin’s Brittany primitivism the second his South Sea primitivism. Gauguin sits with his arms crossed in the position that means “All is finished. There is no more.”

Vincent van Gogh
Vincent sits atop a bell that repeats two of his paintings,

Starry Night and The Gleaner. Both paintings reveal Vincent’s pantheistic Christianity, the first embodying life force, the second considering death. The first shows his influence by Japanese printmaker Hokusai, the second his infuence by painter Millet. Vincent sits with his arms crossed in the position that means “All is finished. There is no more.”

Edvard Munch

Munch sits atop a bell that repeats two of his works, The Scream -- a self-portrait of existential isolation and despair -- on the obverse, and Madonna -- a depiction of the way sex and religion and death became inextricably intertwined in Munch's work -- on the reverse. The depiction of Munch as a skeleton wearing an Edvard Munch mask relates to Munch's use of the Medieval tradition of the danse macabre (the dance of death), adds another layer to Much's taking the pose that means “All is finished. There is no more.”

Hieronymus Bosch dog bell

Gunther Grass dog bell

Frank Herbert dog bell

Double Bell

Abstract Expressionist/Critic double bell

Funerary Reliquary

Metal abstracted representations of the deceased are placed protruding from baskets containing the remains of the subject in the Kota tradition. These figures offer remembrance and protection.

Bart Simpson
(maquette on left, full piece on right)
Private Collection

Andy Warhol
Private Collection

Bob Marley Box

Horror Vacuai Works

Paul Gauguin as Buddha
An homage to Gauguin’s Idole a la Cocquille, the piece presents the artist as the central figure and serves as a rough summation of Gauguin’s key themes, influences and artworks. Gauguin sits in the false-lotus position on the front, complete with nimbus of Tahitian blacklip shell. Around the back are carved figures from his ouevre: at the center of the back panel is a tree of life drawn from one of his woodcuts. To the left is the rough self-portrait Adam, to the right is Eve (both from Pere Paillard). Moving outward, on the left a Breton woman praying (a la Vision after the Sermon) is a profile portrait of Mette Gauguin, on the right is Father Paillard mocked in devilish but prayerful attitude. Finally at the outer edges of the back panel are Oviri, Tahitian goddess with a dead dog at her feet, balanced by Gauguin’s Tahitian Madonna and Child, with his stylized

self-symbolizing wolf at their feet.
On a lower tier beneath this panel is the Europe-exhibited Peruvian mummy with which Gauguin identified and which he visually quoted. (The tree of life grows out of this mummy as everything about Gauguin arises out of his sense of himself as a Peruvian primitive in the European world.) On either side of the mummy are the heads of Gauguin’s influences including Emile Bonnard, Stephane Mallarme, Ed. Degas, Ed. Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne. His mottos are wrapped between the panels -- “soyez mysterieuses” (“be mysterious”) and “soyez amoureuses et vous serez heures” (be in love and you will be happy”).
Private Collection -- Commission

Allegory of the Iron Gall Ink Scholar
In an homage to the style -- and some of the symbols -- of Grinling Gibbons, Dutch-British panel carver of the 17th century, this vase-with-lid commemorates the research interests of a scholar of Iron gall ink.
At the heart of this vase with a lid is a panel that represents the creation of Iron Gall ink -- dripping into a bottle of “Enque” (Gallic ink) are fluid from Oak Galls (represented by the whole and halved galls on oak leaves, along with the gall wasps which create the galls). Also dripping into the bottle are drops from the acacia plant -- which provides the binding agent in the ink. On the left of the panel is a bag of iron nuggets (labelled “Fe”).
A drop of ink falls from the end of a quill pen. Pages, partially obscured behind the panel elements, reveal part of a quote on the necessity of breaking the rules.

The rest of the body of the vase is carved on the illusion of a lace cloth draped over the top of it, with two doves upon it. One dove rests on top of the vase (and is the lid) and passes a cherry to a dove with spread wings arising from the side of the vase. Wrapped around the body of the vase is a ribbon bearing a quotation from Horace copied by a traveling Celtic scholar in the Middle Ages: “They change their sky but not their souls who cross the sea.”
Worked into the piece are also assorted jewels (a pun on the scholar’s name) as well as allusions to the Folger Shakespeare library (whose damaged Puck sculpture is restoring a portrait cameo of Shakespeare). The cloth covered vase shape stands atop a stem created by a thicket of wisteria. which is surrounded by a fountain in which paper documents are washed by water spraying out of the mouths of fanciful fish. At the base of the fountain, in misspelled Italian, is a quotation from a Verdi opera: “I smile to see your future.” Beneath the base of the vase is it’s title, a monogram of the recipients initials, and a latin quotation. Private Collection