Caution: Extreme Violence

I spent at least a week making this life-size, if not fully proportional, baby in clay, and it was a week well-spent. The baby is constructed of separate parts that were assembled at the last stage into one body. Yes, despite the catastrophe in the kiln, it was time well-spent. But I am NOT making a new one soon.

There are three simple mandalas on the front of the baby: on the forehead, over the heart and above the pubic area. I was googling images of tattoos and pondering their massive popularity in the current era. Only some geometric ones appealed to me. So I created three simple radial designs like those one might see in a yoga advertisement - and placed them on what I think are the body's centers.* I imagined them aligning like the chakras along the central meridian.

I burnished the black engobe that covered the red clay with a steel spoon.

So perhaps it wasn't dry enough. Perhaps there was an air bubble trapped in the coils that joined the head to the shoulders. Its tragic, but what shall I say, "Par for the course?" "C'est la vie?" "Oops?"


*According to G. Gurdjieff, the human body has three centers: the emotional, the moving and the intellectual centers.

The Baby at the leather hard stage (one- week- old)