Description
This spirit effigy clay sculpture is a wild-eyed bearded face in tarnished silver, pushing out of a heavy hand-built block of air-dry clay. The eyes bulge on raised studs, the nose juts forward in full relief, and a beard runs down into the carved texture of the base.
The silver pigment drags across the raised ridges and catches a wet gloss on the high points, while black settles into the recessed channels around the eyes and through the carved hair. Bare grey clay shows through wherever the surface lifts. Two small horn nubs sit at the top corners, and the whole face reads weathered, closer to oxidised metal left out in the cold than anything polished. It measures 15 x 9 x 4cm and is solid clay all the way through, so it carries real weight. The piece does not stand upright on its own. It leans best against a wall or sits propped on a shelf or stand. As a handmade sculpture it works as a heavy display piece and a one of a kind collector’s piece.
In the collection’s telling, this spirit is a boundary-keeper, the old face said to sit where the cleared path runs out and the dark trees begin. It is cast as a watcher that takes on the colour of whatever weather it endures, its tarnished silver skin the sheen of frost and lichen worked into the clay over long winters. The bulging eyes never close. It holds the line between safe ground and the woods behind it, and folk learn to leave it be.
An original artwork from the Abyss Collection, sealed and finished, suited to darker folk-leaning shelves and to collectors of grotesque clay faces.
