This is my Sphinx. I have always been drawn to beings that refuse to be one thing. The sphinx is perhaps the most ancient of all hybrid creatures, older than Greek mythology, older than the riddle she posed to Oedipus at the gates of Thebes. She appears on Minoan seals, on Assyrian palace walls, on Etruscan tombs. Everywhere humans have made art, they have made her: the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the face of a woman. She is power, mystery, and beauty fused into a single form. She is the question that has no safe answer. My version of her is not monumental, but intimate, the size of something you could hold in two hands. Her lion body sits in a sphinx's classic pose, forepaws extended, haunches tucked, tail curling behind her. I covered her flanks with terracotta-like spirals and scrollwork, painted directly onto the pale clay, the way ancient Greek potters decorated their vessels thousands of years ago. These ornamental patterns are my way of saying: she belongs to all periods at once. She is archaic and she is now. Her wings are where I allowed myself the most freedom. Each feather is individually shaped and layered, scale upon scale, glazed in pale blue and lavender with touches of iridescent pink at the tips. They catch the light differently depending on the angle. From the side, they look almost like water. From behind, like a fan of mother-of-pearl. I wanted her wings to feel like the one part of her that belongs entirely to the sky, to something beyond the earthbound weight of the lion's body beneath them. And then her face. The same oval, the same green eyes, the same calm that I give to all my figures. But the Sphinx wears a different expression than my angels. My angels are open, devotional, tender. The Sphinx knows something. There is a small smile on her lips, not quite friendly, not quite cruel. She is not going to tell you what she knows. You will have to figure it out yourself. Her hair took the longest, as it always does. Elaborate terracotta curls, braided and coiled and piled high, cascading down to her shoulders where a string of tiny pearls circles her neck. The hair is my signature, but on the Sphinx it becomes something more: a crown, a mane, a meeting point between the human and the animal. Where does the woman end and the lion begin? The curls blur that boundary. That is what I wanted. I think about the sphinx often when I work. Clay is her medium. The oldest surviving sphinxes we know are made of stone and fired earth. When I shape her in my studio in Berlin, I am joining a conversation that stretches back four thousand years, from the workshops of ancient Thebes to the kilns of Corinth to my own hands on a Tuesday afternoon. The material remembers. The form remembers. And the Sphinx, true to her nature, asks her question again, in every century, in every new pair of hands that dares to make her. I never answer it. I just shape the clay, paint the eyes, and let her sit there on her lion's legs, gazing out with that quiet, knowing smile.
These Artworks will not be available online or through galleries: they belong among those, who support me on Patreon, in my personal hidden art shop, where each piece finds its way to those who truly seek it.
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