Marble grave stele of a little girl, ca. 450–440 BCE. Greek, Classical. Marble, Parian, height: 31 3/4 in. (80.6 cm); width (top): 14 9/16 in. (37 cm); width (base): 15 1/2 x 4 in., 131 lb. (39.4 x 10.2 cm, 59.4 kg). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1927 (27.45)
She's saying goodbye to the world, and isn't that masterful of an artist to capture that reluctance?
My name's Adam Fuss and I work mostly with photography.
I was fascinated by this material when I worked as a waiter at the Museum and we could make extra money by working parties at night. And I found myself frequently walking through the classical galleries. And the environment that I found the sculptures in seemed much closer to their nature as sacred objects.
This sculpture is a doorway into a lot of ideas. It's a grave marker and that makes a lot of sense to me. My own work speaks to this passage between material and something else.
It has this dual character of intense beauty and intense sadness. It's a story of a life. We're poised almost in a cinematic moment of a child losing its life. I understand the bird to be symbolic of her life, representing the passage between body and beyond. The intimacy of the symbol of the bird and her mouth, to me, speaks to the idea of her final breath. It's the life force recognizing the sadness in the passage out of the world.
I find it extraordinarily beautiful: the quality of the carving, her hair. It reminds me so much of water. Such an interesting form too—I mean it's a sculpture, but it's as much a drawing in stone. The motion of the fabric speaks to this being another exemplar of life force. The life of the fabric becomes symbolic of the life force. It's falling off, it's broken, and so her life is falling away.
And she's full of all of the optimism of a child, kissing goodbye her pet doves. She's saying goodbye to the world, and isn't that masterful of an artist to capture that reluctance? So much of this work is an attempt to address that part of our experience when the curtain's closing, and trying to peak behind the curtain because we're sure as Hell going into that drama.
There's all of that unlived potentiality, that sort of inherent tragedy. And yet there's so much beauty as well. It's a loving embrace.
