Painted welded steel, 31 x 36 x 24, 2002.
Annunciation scenes are about an arrival. Someone enters a room and announces something, and painters typically set the event in a domestic interior and often put a book in the Virgin’s hands. This sculpture builds the interior and the messenger as separate parts of one piece.
The interior is a shallow curved tray packed with a room’s worth of things: a woven panel laid across the top, a curved pale yellow piece nested in the middle, ball-ended parts, a coiled spring along the base, and a blue plate standing at the back. Everything in it lies down, settled and crowded together, like belongings gathered in one place.
The messenger is the form at the upper right. A hub with blades spread to either side stands on a stalk topped with a ball, and it’s the highest point in the piece. The spread blades read as wings. It rises out of the interior’s far edge and looks out from the rest of the group with its own symmetry. The settled room lies flat, and the visitor stands over it upright with its wings out.
A “Bible study” is an occasion spent over a text, and the text’s scene is shown at table scale, 31 x 36 x 24 inches, small enough to be looked into from above like a room in a model.
