My sculpture Release/Receive is cast in bronze and mounted on a blue curved aluminum column meant
to suggest water and body. Each hand is the same, one in a gesture of letting go, the other of receiving.
The idea comes from a personal ritual during hard times: I stand at the Winooski River looking downstream focusing on letting go and letting difficulties flow away. Then face upstream and meditate on openness
to the future. Release/Receive will be in my sculpture garden on a mound of blue flowering ground-cover
this spring. Thanks to the Vermont Arts Council for making this project possible!
Release/Receive. Cast bronze on powder-coated aluminum. 56.5 x 25 x 25 inches
Below is the indoor version of Release/Receive, cast bronze with a silver patina.
Release/Receive. Cast bronze with silver patina on steel base. 5 x 21.5 x 7 inches
Thinking about how we touch the world and vice versa, I read three books recently. The best and the
shortest is Hands: What We Do with Them and Why, by psychoanalyst Darian Leader. For a shortcut,
here’s a link to one of his lectures, though you may want to listen at least twice to digest the theories.
The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, by Finnish architect
Juhani Pallasmaa – whose book Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses sums up everything
I believe about the power of sculpture and architecture – experiencing with all our senses. He argues
against the primacy of vision (written in 1995, before the ubiquity of screens and smart phones).
And this book may be a little more than you ever want to know about The Hand: How its use shapes
the brain, language and human culture, by neurologist Frank R. Wilson.
Some strong bright forms during the cold dark days,
Leslie
