One day I was walking up the mountain behind our house in Swannanoa, NC and I found, half-buried, and tangled in a vine, a small Fisher-Price toy person. I had one just like it when I was a kid. Androgynous, complacent smile, blonde hair with severe bangs.
I made several rubber molds of the figure from which I cast twenty figures in hard plaster. At the same time I was making a post-apocalyptic sand landscape in a large terrarium. Before I knew it, the people had inhabited the sandscape.
For a while I thought the little people were acting out Old Testament narratives. But perhaps they are ghosts, ancestors of the figure I found in the woods appearing to carry her/him to the afterworld. There is high drama among the Sand People. Unlike the real toy figure who has an innocent expression on his/her face, the Sand People are featureless, no face. Blank. |
