Matriarchs (Eve)
Lost object bronze casting.
In considering these Torah figures, both familiar and larger than life, human and legendary, I was unable to execute a fully clear portrait. Having set myself with the task of trying to describe these individuals I turned both to intimacy – casting scraps of clothing and my own hair in the fabrication of the bronzes – and abstraction, leaving each portrait faceless, vague. A sense of the body removed especially motivated the construction of the matriarch figures, while each one was imbued with a personality, heavily influenced by Ellen Frankel’s 1997 text The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, where each of the matriarchs is personified. Conversely, Moshe has been literally flattened, his figure immaterial within the story told about his life, only the bronze beard & stylized fur shtreimel hat erupt from the surface, depth created by adding genetic and cultural material from this time.