Welded steel, 24 x 16 x 15, 2019.
A seer is defined by two faculties, seeing what others cannot and saying it. The face has the first and begins on the second: eyes opened wide and round, brows drawn up into deep furrows over an old face, a small ribbed mark between them, and lips parted on a gasp. The expression is alarm. Whatever the seer has seen is bad news. The head lifts and the gaze passes the viewer, and if you follow it you meet the wall. The look is complete and what it sees is invisible, which is the audience’s position before any prophet: shown a person transfixed by what you cannot see and left to decide whether to credit it.
The figure is old, and its sex is left open. The tall crown and collar of discs would suit a queen mother or a priestess as readily as a king’s counsellor, and divination has been the office of old women as often as of old men, the Pythia of Delphi among them. The regalia point to the court sculpture of West Africa, where the cast heads of Benin wear tall coiffures and beaded collars. The studded shoulder plates point to the armoured portrait bust of imperial Rome. The figure is dressed in two traditions of honouring the powerful and belongs to neither, a seer as a type, not any one court’s.
The dress keeps the composure the face has lost. Crown, collar, and plate are the regalia of rank and the armour of a messenger, and the face is the one part left unprotected, so it announces what the costume would hold back. The bust is the form in which a city honours those it already believes, and this one honours a figure whose face gives no comfort.
