Steadfastness

Steadfastness is a sculpture of melted used plastic straws, plaster, glass and painted welded chain, 35 × 93 × 30 cm, 2021.

Walking in Vilnius old town I look at the decoration on the buildings, the art nouveau and art deco reliefs of women. In 2018 I made reliefs of my own women from melted used straws collected in bars. I cut, ground and melted the straws at high temperature and experimented with a 3D printer, clay, plaster, silicone and epoxy.

One face I placed on an indigo-blue glass circle melted from shards of blue bottles. The circle rests on a welded vertical chain, which would never hold like that on its own: the second hint at the title. The painted chain is beautiful and no weaker for it; the broken glass is vulnerability. So with a woman: beauty is not weakness. The dark square base is the earth, the circle the sky.