Bronze, fabricated and cast
48" x 19" x 30'
Created for the mid-career survey exhibition [re]collection with support of the Ohio Arts Council and the College of the Arts, The Ohio State University
I saw The Last Judgement by Heironymus Bosch (ca. 1500), in Bruges, Belgium, in 1993 and held onto a postcard of a detail of the painting. It depicts a figure straddling a large knife. He is being sliced in two. Blood drips down the side of the knife. It’s a tough image, and it stuck with me. Six years later it became the source for this sculpture of a monumental knife on which is strapped a life-size bronze saddle. The work came into focus as I thought about the Bosch image in the context of the change of the millennium. At the time, it was cause for both anxiety and excitement. On a broader level, I see the work addressing tension and discomfort—of the unknown … of the future … of our fates. By implication, the individual viewer imagines sitting astride the huge knife—protected, unlike Bosch’s poor soul, by the saddle—and riding away … where?
