DELUGE: A sculpture by Tammy Graham

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DELUGE – Front View – Words by Bob Drouin
I’ve noticed in this and the other bronzes that you have a highly developed sense of form. It is a pleasure to just let one’s eyes feel the plasticity and slide along the surfaces, and imagine fingertips and hands doing the same. There is a richness of surface texture and visual texture that might best be described as sensuous.

But one cannot not get seduced by the formalities for there is clearly a restless content animating them from within.

There is a duality to this piece just as there was in Romance – again a from within, and/or from without quality. In both cases I sense the young woman is not yet fully in the phenomenal world, but rather emerging.

From the front she appears as though attempting to awake, to emerge from her dreams (thoughts) and free herself of some torment that threatens to swallow her up. She has a look of anguish. The threat is of drowning psychologically: of being pulled back into a pool of fears teaming with ghosts and monsters. She instinctively lifts her head up and opens the way for the air of life to enter, and the whimpers of fear to vanish, for she’s trying to be strong, as solid as brass. She will not succumb – at least not tonight. With one more gasp she will awaken again, and as her hair rises off the pillow she will forget and move on, having won this night’s struggle. But there is also fragility about her – the tension around the eyes, a diminishing of the cheekbones and jaw, a tatteredness of the hair that shows the true gravity of her situation.

Have you watched a person dying? In the final hours, their look is very similar to your sculpture. The eyes close and the jaw hangs slack, and the tongue lies gently in the mouth. The hair is disordered. There is a tension around the eyes very similar to what you have shown, but within the last hour of life, that tension starts to vanish. The skin on the forehead smoothes out, and the years unwind before your eyes. While being pre-occupied with the poetry of these changes, we fail to see they mean that all body strength has extinguished; and the head, no longer supported as it has been for a lifetime by the muscles of the neck, begins a slow imperceptible descent forward, eventually cutting off the air pipe, and bringing on death.

Your sculpture girl is not at risk of dying anytime soon, but without help, I would not predict a long and full life.

From the side I see an individual emerging from the collective pool of whatever this universal deluge is all about. The deluge may be the original waters in Biblical terms, or the primordial pool, or the big bang or what ever metaphor one chooses for the Source of all being. Before our eye, she is being born into our time, taking in her first animating breath, emerging whole and fully ready to be the individual she already is and always was. She arrives in our plane strong and solid and knowing, for she is not changing in character, just in form.

I’m sensing something else in this work that is causing me to take possession of the image to the point where it is almost no longer your creation, but mine. When I used to meditate, at the bottom of my journey, at the lowest and calmest point, I found myself in complete darkness listening to the gentle splashing of a small brook running over rocks. Very peaceful. Now amplify this to the opposite extreme, and you have Niagara Falls in broad daylight – my only and greatest fear! (This is true. I have a crippling fear of the falls. To me it is the voice of God.)

The texture of the brass running down the back of the woman’s head reminds me of Niagara Falls, so I am making a strong connection to the grand scope of DELUGE and creation, and I can’t help but see that the woman is the womanifestation of God emerging from the waters of the Niagara River taking in that first breath of air on a vast scale, and I watch from the shore paralyzed by the vision and my proximity to it.

Of course, I recognize how much the two dimensional presentation has to do with this perception, but I like it. The picture from the side presents a very powerful image to me, but I think the actual sculpture might be able to accomplish the same if viewed from a similar angle. I would like to see it. Is it around here.