ProjectIt might seem strange for a moment that my work would go in this direction but the loss of family and the need to push back against evil were all that were needed to create these works. The Holocaust was indeed a very dark time in human history. There seemed to be no bottom to the depths to which evil would go to manifest its purpose. We are left with far too many images that are so horrible to look at that our perspective is often skewed. We wonder is this real, or we are unable to focus our eyes upon the images because in their truth they reveal only the grotesque. After viewing thousands of black and white images for my project, I saw a color film of the Jews in the train yards. I was suddenly reminded of what the words 'innocent victims' mean when the stark distance afforded by time and reinforced by black and white was shattered. The color gave birth to the spark of life, like home movies. People, regardless of how God may have viewed their eternal lives, did have meaningful earthly existence. They were adults with jobs, children in school, and babies hungry for life, but they were snuffed out by the gears of a terrible machine. The purpose of my project was to restore, in as much as possible the innocence of vast numbers of victims. How to accomplish this task became a dilemma and I had no answer so I turned to the pencil and the clay and I tried to draw and create but only images of ghostly spirits would come. Then one day as I finished cutting clay with a template to use to create many ghosts, I inadvertently held the template on an angle and from across the room came the defining comment. "Oh what a nice bird." I was taken completely by surprise. As I held my template at arms length on a slight angle, there it was, God had provided. It was not just a bird, but a dove. The adventure of getting from there to this wall piece was a long one, but here it is. Many doves clustered together. It was designed as a screen on which to show the grotesque images which would then fade away leaving innocence still intact. Never Forget ! |