I found her on a Brisbane street, among a mountain of hard rubbish, entangled between an old table and broken louvres. As an artist, I’m always drawn to what people discard on the footpath. A neighbour offered me a baby’s cot he was adding to his pile, but it was the pregnant woman who caught my eye.
She joined the cornucopia of suburban treasures I had bower-birded kerbside: wire and wood, a vintage ladder, a guitar amp and the thousand-dollar pewter Martin Szekely Dom Pérignon champagne ice bucket I now use to wash my paintbrushes.
I brought her inside and placed her beneath a plant.
One evening, several months later, the light from my kitchen caught her curious curves and I looked more closely at her form: a ripe, round belly marked by cross-hatched scars; a bold bolt of arcing hair; a vesica piscis between kneeling legs; large uplifted hands supporting a wooden disc. Through the small miracle of image search, I soon found her African sisters.
She was, it appeared, a Luba Caryatid Stool from the Democratic Republic of Congo. A long, long way from home.
The female form is revered throughout Luba arts, reflecting the archetypal feminine within its culture and spirituality. Caryatid stools symbolise the seat of power in ceremony and ritual. Their low, round forms, carved from solid tree trunks, honour the feminine element of power beneath the throne: that from which all come, upon which all rest, and without which none can rule.
Artists have traditionally been held in high esteem within Luba culture, especially those with disabilities. It was believed that, in place of hunting or fighting prowess, they embodied an abundance of spiritual and creative gifts. I tend to concur.
Luba art also occupies a pivotal place in the history of the Modernist art movement. In Europe, figures such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse openly acknowledged the direct influence of these Central African forms on their own genre-defying work.
I don’t know how she ended up abandoned in a Brisbane street, but I have known the stories of many others before her. Thousands of women discarded or rejected, their value unrecognised very often by themselves, for I once worked as a counsellor and development officer* for a domestic and family violence service, placing women into safe refuge every night.
She has a few cracks and bumps, but with tender care, I gently rubbed oil into her beautiful curves, and once again she glows in rich wooden splendour.
After supporting tribal kings of Africa and firing the creative blood of the Fauves and Cubist men of modernism, it seems beautifully circular that she now kneels serenely in my studio, holding aloft one of my ceramic Sublime Vessels with their connotations of transformation and rebirth.
A symbolic reminder of the sacred in our lives that lays waiting to be uncovered, restored and returned to a place of honour.
Suburban Gothic and the Sublime Divine, indeed.
*In 2005 I established first statewide the Pets in Crisis partnership between DVConnect and RSPCA in Australia