The SHAPE of HUMANITY

Sculptural fragments from antiquity—heads without bodies, torsos without

- JOHN O'HERN

 heads, arms or legs— retain their connection to the familiarly corporeal and the skill of their creation.

The Musée Rodin in Paris notes, Convinced of the evocative power of the fragment, Rodin worked the hands or feet of his figures separately. His private collection of antiquities included many archaeological fragments: hands, heads, and torsos... These sculptures influenced his own aesthetic, prompting him to remove the arms or heads from some of his sculptures. The Walking Man, for example, is an enlarged version of St. John the Baptist, without the head and arms which Rodin regarded as superfluous details, liable to detract from the expression of movement he wanted to convey.”

Writing about Rodin and his creation of fragmentary sculpture, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke commented, In the art of sculpture...it is left to the artist to make out of many things one thing, and from the smallest part of a thing, an entirety.” Rodin, himself, said these divine fragments.. move me more profoundly than living persons.”

In his figures, Nathan Mellott refers to deteriorating classical and ancient statuary but they have greater inspiration in heightened awareness of the corporeal. The palms refer to the most common trees in the world’s oldest cities while giving a sense of depth and space for the balletic, aerial bodies. The flat color application was inspired by Etruscan and Grecian painted pottery.

“I look for a quality in my work and others’) which testifies to our contemporary existence; that carries the torch forward. If we hold true that those who came before us are more base or savage than ourselves, then we prompt future generations So happiness timelessness; to hold those same beliefs of us. and sadness in every corner; love, desperation, the poetic and vulgar; simultaneity; the sacred and debased; the deep past and the deep future in the present.