Welded steel, 74 x 18 x 18, 2007.
Minerva is patron of wisdom and of the crafts, the goddess of people who work with their heads and hands. The portrait bust is the form a culture uses to honor someone it wants remembered: head and shoulders, raised on a column so that the viewer looks up. Rome made it the standard way to commemorate its own people, ancestors, magistrates and emperors. Minerva gives that treatment to the goddess, who is shown as a sitter would be. The column has a molded base and a flared top, and it’s much taller than the bust it carries.
The face is naturalistic. It’s a young face with slightly parted lips and an unguarded expression, and it has none of the fixed severity of a war goddess. The studded helmet on her head is a drill bit: a tool that goes into a material to reach what lies beneath its surface, and inquiry is described in the same terms. Her war helmet becomes the headgear of the maker and the student.
