Sleepless Guardian of the Hearth

Description

Working with this centuries-old olive root, I found myself thinking of Max Ernst’s “The Angel of the Hearth.” The angel in his painting is born of paper and paint — flat, flying, ready to vanish with a single stroke of the brush. Wood does not permit such fragility: it carries weight and holds its form in an entirely different way.

I carved along lines that already existed within the trunk — sharp fractures, sudden turns, as though the tree had repeatedly changed its mind about which direction to grow next. In these turns I saw not chaos, but vigilance: a creature that does not sleep, because its task is to stand watch.

I left the openings piercing the mass largely untouched beyond what was necessary — they were already caves waiting within the trunk, and I only widened them enough for light to pass all the way through, rather than get caught inside. These voids are not decoration. They are places where the guardian lets the world pass through itself, instead of blocking it out.

The polishing of the surface was not incidental: beneath it emerged a dense network of veins, dark and branching like vessels — I wanted the wood to look not like a dead material, but like something still capable of responding to touch.

I left the marble base deliberately cold and detached — the heavy, restless form above needed a support that would not compete with it. The stone simply holds; all the tension is given over to the wood.

Walked around, the sculpture refuses to be read in a single way: from one angle the guardian seems to peer intently into the distance, from another it curls inward, as if hiding from its own gaze. What mattered to me was not to fix one final pose, but to leave this creature in a state of constant, unresolved vigilance — as a guardian standing at a threshold should be.

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