The
artist imprinted her
face sequentially on 14 pieces of paper in sanguinary vermillion, tracking her disturbances over 17 hours of sleep; beneath these wall - mounted anthropometries
lie rows of stolen bed sheets, printed with the name of a local hospital interspersed with drifts of red pigment.
(In «The Room, Tarzana,» a quietly desirous image from 1967, the
artist's lover
lies face down on a bed, naked below the waist.)
Early in 1940 we managed to find a small house and for the next three years... I was not able to carve at all... the only sculptures I carried out were some small plaster maquettes for the second «sculpture with colour», and it was not until 1943, when we moved to another house, that I was able to carve this idea... In St Ives I was fortunate enough to have constant contact with
artists and writers and craftsmen who lived there, Ben Nicholson my husband, Naum Gabo, Bernard Leach, Adrian Stokes, and there was a steady stream of visitors from London who came for a few days rest, and who contributed in a great measure to the important exchange of ideas and stimulus to creative activity... It was during this time that I gradually discovered the remarkable pagan landscape which
lies between St Ives, Penzance and Land's End; a landscape which still has a very deep effect on me, developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in landscape - sculpture in landscape and the essential quality of light in relation to sculpture which induced a new way of piercing the forms to contain colour... The sea, a flat diminishing plane, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinitude of blues, greys, greens and even pinks of strange hues; the lighthouse and its strange rocky island was an eye; the Island of St Ives an arm, a hand, a
face... I used colour and strings in many of the carvings of this time.
Pac Man Pepper is used equally playful as an
artist's palette that resembles a
face lies on a canvas next to pepper plant branches.