Painted welded steel, 74 x 42 x 54, 2003.
Liberty is known by two things she holds: a torch in her raised arm and a tablet in the other. The raised arm of this figure remains, ending in an open tube with nothing in it. The other arm ends bluntly, without a hand to hold a tablet. Both gestures are still there and both have been emptied, and she is left identifiable by her pose and by the title.
A smooth dark hood covers her head, which tips to one side. A head covering is one of Liberty’s own attributes. Roman Libertas is shown with the cap that marked a freed slave, and the Statue of Liberty wears a crown of rays. The hood sits in the same position as those and means the reverse. It is also the image of the prisoner in the early 2000s, when detainees were seized, covered and moved out of public view. “Abduction” is the word for a seizure carried out in secret, and the hood is the secrecy.
She is seated nonetheless in the setting of a monument. A blue block between two stepped plinths forms the seat, a white cloth lies across her lap like a robe, and she leans against a large rimmed disc that rises behind her. A long flat band falls from her lap to the floor and curls at its end, and it reads as a tether. The same body is enthroned and entrapped.
