Soldered brass, 11.5 x 9.5 x 5.5, 2021.
The title is the opening line of the Prologue to Henry V. The Chorus calls for a Muse of fire “that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention,” then concedes that the stage is an “unworthy scaffold” for so great an object and asks the audience to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.” The speech pairs an epic summons with a confession of poor means. The sculpture stages the same predicament in brass: the invoked muse is assembled from the contents of a dresser drawer.
The fire is made of ornament. A crescent tray with a pierced Greek-key border, a cast plate of vine leaves and grapes, and a scalloped shell dish fan upward from a spherical body with a drilled nozzle, and together they take the silhouette of a flame. The materials are classical in their vocabulary. The meander is Greek, and the grapes belong to Dionysus, the god from whose festivals Greek drama arose. The Muse is therefore furnished with the apparatus of the theatre she is asked to serve, and every part of it is the commercial ornament of a tray, a trivet, and a bonbon dish.
The base is the scaffold. A beaded, bracket-footed tray carries a pyramidal block, and on this small stage stands everything the Chorus asks us to take for the field of Agincourt. A flared horn, pierced at its base, turns its mouth to the viewer. It is the Chorus’s mouthpiece, and like him it addresses the audience directly across the footlights.
