Here is the story of the travertine pool inlaid into the granite base.

Sculptors must decide which way is up on their sculptures – – establish the vertical axis. Sometimes, as in Heart of Anima, which barely kisses its base, sculptures rotate freely around that axis. Here, I fixed the Madonna relative to the pool by cutting off its bottom with a saw and using two metal pins to keep it from rotating. I was still deciding what to do with the scrap from the base when my neighbour Megan Davis visited my studio. I’d been imagining it as the top of a travertine sphere emerging from the granite, domed up and proud, but didn’t have a good reason to do that. Megan suggested making a pool out of it, like a real pool in a forest, below the surface of the black granite base.  So I made it like that.

As forms, Reflections and Madonna and Child are directly descended from Anima IV. To help me decide how to carve two sculptures in what was left of a 5 foot column of Persian travertine after Red Recursion, I built a 3D computer model of Anima IV in Rhino. I squished it downward, stretched it upward, twisted it in various ways, and generally played with it to see what I might come up with in the same family of forms. What I wanted was two closely related forms, of the same size and in the same material, expressing the same set of human qualities but in different ways. Both Madonna and Child and Reflections came out of that exercise.

Photos and computer model by Lee Gass