I think this is longest time I haven’t written an entry and I have been trying to figure out why.
Festivities, family visitors, foggy brain, I just haven’t had the time to finish a post I started in December or to think through what I needed to say. So I have abandoned my ‘seasons greetings’ and moved into the ‘January blues’ and finally on a quiet Sunday I can write about ‘consumption’. The disease that took many was named ‘consumption because helpless bystanders saw the dying consumptive facing night sweats and chills, paroxysmal cough, which spread the disease to other organs of the body, and of course, the wasting away.
To consume comes from the Latin consūmere to devour. (v. t.) To destroy, as by decomposition, to waste; to burn up; to eat up; to devour. In old english ‘consumer’ meant the devil. Like fire consumes wood, the devil would consume the souls of men. It is the nature of the demonic realm, ‘profligate people are brethren of the devil’.
I have realised that I have spent the last month and a half ‘consuming’. Devouring food, in taking caffeine, an active consumer buying presents, shopping, to waste time watching television, facebook. Swept along with society. To me it seems that is what the month of December is now based on, these apparently shared values of “consumerism,” and “pleasure” and idea that the world is created basically for play and entertainment.
January means we are suffering from the over indulgence of December as we try to reign back the wildness of our lower selves. We have sold our higher level of being to ‘consumption’ and so we slowly destroy ourselves, waste away slowly. January feels long and dark as we look forward to spring to detox, cleanse ourselves and search for light of our ‘souls’ to return. So that we don’t “sell our souls” to the devil.
My point of all these references is that, we sold the 5 ‘souls’ which were in exhibition at The Royal British Sculptor Society and so all these pieces now have a new home. So there is a happier more positive outcome to my reason for writing but the point is we mustn’t forget to take care of our soul, for that is the nature that makes us human.
The more you stare at the pieces, the more faces you see and it feels like there is a lot within and I guess this depends on how deep your imagination can go. The ‘Soul’ is something for the imagination, you don’t see it, feel it , taste it, or measure it. Using the colours somehow activates these ‘Souls’ and breathes life in to the pieces, also making the heavy steel weightless.The block of solid mild steel used are car panels from classic british racing Raleigh cars. I believe our souls are weightless too. It is easy to describe emotions with colours and it is fascinating that universally we share the same emotions but to different degrees. White to present innocence. Green for hope. Black for hate. Blue for sorrow. Red for violence. All sorts of colours could represent the emotion or experience we go through.
