Soldered brass, 13 x 19 x 9, 2018.
The Sirens of the Odyssey promise knowledge: they offer to tell the listener everything that happens on the fertile earth. Odysseus survives by being tied to the mast while his crew’s ears are stopped. The lure is a promise of interior knowledge, and the defence is restraint. Siren Song builds both halves of that situation into one object. The scrolled brackets on either side work like a proscenium or a gate, framing the figure as a spectacle. The twisted column at the left edge stands apart from the ornament as a vertical, the one rigid element in a composition that otherwise yields and curves. It reads as a mast, the post to which the listener is bound.
The sculpture is small enough to be handled, and it must be opened to be known, which makes the viewer a participant in the myth. The Sirens’ promise was always of something withheld and interior. By requiring a physical act to reach its inside, the work puts the viewer in Odysseus’s position: the ornament, the open mouth and the shells all invite approach, and the reward is concealed behind a closure that the viewer’s own hands must break. Whether to open it is the same question the myth poses to the man at the mast.
