son of Man Sculpture

Edition 2 of 5 of 'Son of Man' was recently purchased by the Pretoria Art Museum for their permanent collection. This is a slightly larger than life-size bronze male figure supported by 4 fabricated steel "stilts". This is my largest piece yet and one which could be perceived as almost the antithesis of most of my other work in the sense that the figure is intimately connected to technological structures rather than to the natural (animal) world. The figure’s near-nakedness is in sharp contrast to the hardness of the constructions that supports him: my aim with this figure was to explore at the same time human longing for transcendence and the inescapable vulnerability of the human individual in navigating life and the world, a vulnerability that perhaps, ironically, fuels the cold hard edge of our technology. For me transcendence is to do with going beyond limitations. We all long for it. We strive for it in a host of ways. Money, material things, and success, are all to do with this restless need for transcendence. But in the end it is very close to us. ‘Son of Man’ attempts by all his might to transcend vulnerability and free himself from the constraints his body places on him. This is to me another profound aspect of the human condition, the desire to free ourselves from constraint. But we cannot do this as we are all ultimately doomed to return to dust, the humus (from where we get the word humility). To move away from this misguided and limited sense of transcendence, from (our myth of) being in the world as though we control it, to being in the world as though we share it, requires a huge shift in the way we understand ourselves in relation to our environment.

Sculpture:Metal on Bronze

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:98.4 W x 137.8 H x 59.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.