I saw a photo of a 1920s Surrealist installation where body parts oozed out of a room's walls, chairs, beds, as if bodies in some other space were intersecting with ours. I tried it in this unfired clay piece and hung it in a corner. I find it disorienting and rather disturbing. I plan to try more: hands groping from a wall, a spine just breaking the surface, or a single breast, an elbow or knee, partial faces at odd angles... My take on them was very slow to develop.

1996/9/18

Hot day. Sculpt with my friend Dawn at her house. I tell her of my recent eruption of childhood fears... as a phobic herself, she can relate.

Then Dawn's upstairs neighbor Lisa comes down to sunbathe, in Rocky and Bullwinkle shorts. She says “You did that wonderful statue of the two cats kissing!” making me feel better. Still, Dawn & I can’t converse as freely with her in the yard. She plunks down ten feet away, eyes closed, on her back, long legs spread and crotch aimed at me. Pretty blatant flirting. I'm startled, since Lisa's a newlywed!

Find myself sculpting spread legs and crotches today. I wonder why?

1. A tiny study for a 3-part wall-sculpture: a face, shoulder and hip emerging from wall.
2. A larger version of torso from side, twisting, emerging from wall. No, looks too normal; I wanted outline where wall slices it to be compelling & surreal, just looks like a normal figure study, pretty but not eerie.
3. Stylize torso, make it clearly wrong, more a protoplasm pipe that emerges absent-mindedly from the wall, starts to form a pelvis and leg, then turns liquid again and flows back into the wall. Still looks normal. Too many male sculptors have isolated their sexual feelings about women’s bodies and sculpted them like this already, I think. Start over.
4. Large relief of a face at 3/4 angle, neither facing out of wall nor profile. Can’t manage it, keeps flattening and distorting badly. I still like the concept--never seen a face coming out of a wall that's NOT full-face--but I think I'll need to make a complete head in the round and slice it to get it right.
5. Try ambiguous torso with spread legs and pussy on top (pretty much what Lisa's trying so hard to show me.) But soon her legs turn into necks... leading to two heads! Of her marriage? Interesting. But the torso sags, won’t stay up.
6. Redo it as a wall-piece--let the house support it. Much more Y-shaped--spread legs now dominate. Makes the torso look vaguely phallic, but with vaginal puckers at both ends--navel near the cut-off. And the long leg-necks have... animal heads? Whaaaat?

This proves it’s not an inner ARTISTIC critic, but my radical family’s guilt-tripping. My father’s early poverty made him agree with my mother’s more ideological ecologism. Never waste a page--even if conservation wastes your time and stunts your talent!

1996/11/8

Try again to make a simple torso that’ll fit in a corner: out of one wall, into the other. Fail again. Need to do in the round and cut afterward.

1997/1/15

At sundown, drive over to Dawn’s. Forget to bring the dream-comix I've been doing... again. Shy? Such personal stuff.

Dawn’s really happy with the new background screens I brought her last time: CENSTAR, CENCIRC, LIZ... I thought most of those old pictures were probably junk, but on her big screen they do look nice. Like stained glass.

We sculpt. Dawn's working on a cat--just as disturbingly spiny as the last. "I can do pussy too!" I say. I need to. Recent dreams urged me to re-try that sculpture I couldn’t do last year: a piece to fit in a corner: legs come out of one wall, crotch in the corner, torso disappears into the other wall. Only this time I make the labia smile... and build a whole face around that smile.

In response, Dawn starts modifying her Egyptian cat with a huge groove up the front & floral spikes & tendrils. Calls it a huge spiked vagina. But she sees no connection with her previous cat-with-spines till I say--well, blurt--“MORE spiky pussy?”

1997/3/21

Dawn had to cancel--had to work. So I sculpt alone on my porch. Scrape & carve at statue designed to hang in the corner of a room. Think it’s a total failure, nothing to lose. Was a pelvis with a face in the crotch, sideways, in profile, facing down, so the labia are lips. Too complicated--two ideas at once.

1. Woman coming out of the wall & disappearing into right-angle wall
2. The visual pun of the lips/labia. Smiling. Face...

Still not great, but better. Coming into focus.

1998/7/21

Carve away at that torso-emerging-from-wall meant to hang in a corner. Slowly gets better. Bore a new hole on the back so it hangs as if swimming through walls to the right--not to the left as before. Somehow that helps. Seems lighter, floating, what I wanted all along. As if exempt from our world's gravity--and rules!

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