We start off this new year with the 50th issue in my Sculpture of the Month series! I began this labor of love with the intention to offer those who appreciate my work some inspiration to (A) dig deeper into the sculptures’ meanings for themselves and (B) find creative, mystical guidance for moving through life, year after year.
As with any New Year, we cannot know what lies ahead of us, but the anxieties resulting from the unpredictability of the new U.S. government, combined with the uncertainty of how several devastating wars will end, makes us deeply pensive about what will come.
For the first SOM of 2025, I’ve chosen a piece from 2001 to help us contemplate this situation.
Inscrutable Visionary at the Portal
The main figure is a shaman with a skull-like head covered in luxuriant hair. One long set of curls anchors downward into the darker half of the sculpture while the other extends upward over a portal into the future.
The skull is often seen as a symbol of mortality, but in many historical cultures it was understood as the seat of the soul, enabling one to transcend boundaries from one life to the next since it holds the accumulation of wisdom through a lifetime. More recently, skulls have come to symbolize the rebellion of countercultural movements that seek to reject the social norms of the status quo to build a better future.
The shaman is flanked by two animal figures who offer additional symbolic messages: a pelican to the left and a rabbit to the right.
Pelicans live on the land, in the air, and dive underwater. Therefore, this pelican may appear to point us toward the spiritual connections between the past/present/future as well as the unconscious/conscious/
On the other side of the shaman, an excited rabbit points toward the portal. The rabbit is known to be the luckiest of all twelve animals in the Chinese zodiac, representing mercy, elegance, and beauty. People born in the Year of the Rabbit are thought to be calm and peaceful. They avoid fighting and arguing at all times, are artistic, and have good taste. Because of their rapid reproduction, they are also seen as a symbol of fertility, appearing symbolically at Easter when the growing season returns. Thus, the rabbit’s excitement while peering into the portal of the future provides a positive omen.
As such, this shaman’s insight appears to offer the wisdom of using intuition to look beyond the uncertainty of the future into the positive possibilities that come when we engage our spiritual connections with a creative focus on mercy, elegance, and beauty, rather than social norms of productivity, competition, and financial ambition. Perhaps the future need not be so inscrutable, after all.
