Soldered brass, 14 x 15 x 9, 2022.
Baba Yaga is a standing figure, frontal and symmetrical, with a skull for a face. A crumpled sheet-metal kerchief is pulled low over the brow, above hollow orbits and a nasal aperture. The torso is a smooth dome, crossed by fork-like implements whose slender tines read simultaneously as ribs and as clutching finger bones. A fluted, bell-shaped skirt hangs below, and from it emerge two spirally twisted legs ending in pointed boots. Two large feathered wings, finely textured, spread from the back. A raptor’s head peers out at the hem on the left, and a cast frog sits at the right, both beside a verdigris-green mound that serves as the figure’s ground.
The title places the work in Slavic folklore, where Baba Yaga is the forest witch who lives in a hut on fowl’s legs, travels in a mortar, and fences her yard with skulls. Her defining trait is ambivalence. She devours travelers and also grants help, and she presides over thresholds between the domestic and the wild, the living and the dead. The word baba means an old woman, and the kerchief fixes that identity at once: it is the headcovering of the village grandmother, set directly over a skull. Domestic familiarity and death occupy the same head, and the work declines to rank them.
That fusion places the sculpture inside the memento mori tradition and the late medieval and Northern Renaissance imagery of the Danse Macabre, in which Death appears in the clothing of the living, as in Hans Baldung Grien’s pairings of skeletons with maidens. The proportions complicate the genre. The rounded body, short stance, and wings give the figure the build of a putto or a child’s doll, so that the skull appears on what would otherwise be a cherub. The winged infant is the standard emblem of love and innocence in European art, and the work reverses it into a figure of mortality.
Each attribute marks a boundary state. The wings suggest flight, which is how the folkloric witch travels. The frog is an amphibian, a creature that lives between water and land, and a stock companion of witches. The raptor stands for the predator and the messenger. The verdigris mound suggests forest floor or bog, the setting in which the tales unfold. The skirt-and-legs arrangement also supports a second reading: a domed, fluted body raised on twisted legs is a dwelling on stilts, which is the hut itself. As in much of McCourt’s recent work, the sculpture sustains two readings, figure and building, without resolving them.
Formally, the work belongs to the tradition of found-object figural assemblage, from Picasso’s constructions through the cast-and-assembled figures of Eduardo Paolozzi, in which manufactured parts are combined into a body whose origins remain visible. The wings and frog read as cast ornaments, the skirt and torso as sheet forms, and the legs as turned elements of the kind found in furniture. Solder joins them without disguising the joins. The patination does the unifying work: pink-copper on the skirt, dark steel-grey on the wings, bronze on the face and boots, and blue-green on the base and frog. Warm and cold colors are distributed so that the figure is read as a single body with differing skins.
At table scale, with a frontal stance and a ground of its own, the piece has the presence of a household icon or a shrine figure. It was made in the same year as The Sorcerer, and the two form a pair: a practitioner of magic built from industrial steel, and a figure of folk tradition built from domestic brass. Within Ryan McCourt’s practice, Baba Yaga extends salvage assemblage from the language of industry to the language of myth, and the discarded household object becomes the raw material of a very old fear.
