This is the same stuff as appears on greg metcalf ritual art. After a hiatus from posting images, it's just simpler to start over than try to figure out the correct email and password combination to get control of the old page.

Eventually, everything that is on the other page will appear here along with the updates of new works.

I hope you enjoy it.

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New Stuff:

Dante Alighieri in Purgatory -- a humility nkisi

Dante Alighieri climbs the mountain of Purgatory with a boulder on his back, the weight of his pride which he will slowly lose as he rises higher toward Paradise. 
The Ps on his forehead signify his sins that he also slowly leaves behind.
In his box is a portrait of Beatrice, his guiding light and one true love. 
(The boulder is a bizarre piece of driftwood I found on the Eastern Shore. Sometimes it is replaced by volumes of works on Western Literature and Western Civilization.)  

Alfred Hitchcock -- an art from childhood terror nkisi 

Alfred Hitchcock attributed his unique perspective on guilt and paranoia to a childhood experience when his father took little Alfred to jail and had the police lock him up to see what happened to bad boys.
His box is a small prison with a photo of him as a baby locked behind bars.
Here Hitchcock presents us with a crumpled up dollar, the "MacGuffin" -- the thing you watch in his films when you should be watching something else. Behind his back he holds a knife dripping blood, the thing you should have been watching.

Where these came from

These sculptures arose out of a simple case of nkisi envy. About twenty years ago a friend brought one of the Congolese power figures to dinner and I wanted one. I went out the next day and bought wood and blades and started making my first nkisi.

My first response to the nkisi was a visceral aesthetic response: the aged wood and rusted nails, the sense of a history seen in materials added over time. But I also responded to the idea of a figure representing someone on the next plane of existence who might intervene for me, the honouring of an ancestor and asking for help through the ritual acts of feeding and driving mbau (the nails and such) into the figure.

At the same time I had been voraciously reading world mythology -- from Gilgamesh and the Niebelung myths to the Nag Hamadi, the Mahabarata, Native American Raven stories and the fairy tale collections of Victorian England. The common threads of these stories quickly emerge, as does the underlying pattern of historically factual local heroes who became cultural exemplars and, eventually, supernatural beings who could act on behalf of those who remembered them. And yet these compelling stories seemed to be presented as being irrelevant to our present day digital world, something for the less sophisticated, of the past, of the primitive. As I finished my first nkisi (of the artist Joseph Cornell) I realized I was making an art of the present that looked at our world through the mythologizing lens of ritual. And there wasn’t much difference.

The sculptures in this show mainly represent cultural heroes who I -- or others -- would like to honour and to have intervening somewhere. As I expanded beyond the model of the mnkisi to other ritual objects like ceremonial rattles and memory boards I also began to incorporate forms and rituals from Asian, Latin American, Celtic and Mediterranean cultures. The function of the figure as an icon of a specific attribute associated with the specific person memorialized became much more important. Still these works are most strongly inspired by the place of art in African ritual.

Process and Materials

With the exception of the Divination Boards (which are carved from pine), all of these pieces are carved from basswood with additions of found objects, especially rusted metal, and mirrors. The surface patination is an adaptation of forgers techniques, with the initial colour created through a blend of stains and shoe polish that is then “aged” by applications of assorted libations -- "feedings" -- before and after being buried in various dirts and clays.

Mnkisi

There are certain formal conventions for the nkisi (mnkisi is plural). The sculpture -- sometimes called a “power figure” -- is posed with one arm raised, brandishing a weapon and has a medicine packet -- sort of a “mojo” -- behind a mirror in its belly. This power is released by driving nails (mbau) into the body, sometimes with notes or identifying objects attached.

Certain personal conventions have developed. The sculptures had to have genitals to “work,” so the males are dressed above the waist in the clothing of their time, below in the naked timelessness of dream. The mirror which covers the mojo has been encased in a box which contains a distilled “portrait” of the figure. Some of the figures end up with mirrors for eyes and most of the figures end up with face markings, a forehead symbol drawn from a variety of traditions and the seers among the group also bear the traditional eye circles and nose line of the shaman.

The female figures have developed incorporating many of these same conventions, except the top half of the body is also initially exposed, using the breasts as a signifier of female power (the traditional balance to the exposed penis of the males), with the hands generally reinforcing the breasts rather than being raised in the male gesture of threat. Following another traditional African presentation, Mbau are not driven into the females, instead they are invoked through addition of materials -- through wrapping, tying, painting and inscribing. For reasons unclear to me, the mirror boxes of the female mnkisi I create have round mirror boxes in contrast to the square boxes of the males.

Dante Alighieri in Purgatory -- a humility nkisi

Dante Alighieri climbs the mountain of Purgatory with a boulder on his back, the weight of his pride which he will slowly lose as he rises higher toward Paradise. 
The Ps on his forehead signify his sins that he also slowly leaves behind.
In his box is a portrait of Beatrice, his guiding light and one true love.
(The boulder is a bizarre piece of driftwood I found on the Eastern Shore. Sometimes it is replaced by volumes of works on Western Literature and Western Civilization.)  


 





Albert Barnes -- an art scholar’s nkisi  (no image)
Barnes was a collector and scholar of modern and African art and design in all it’s forms. His weapon is a well-designed set of workman’s calipers -- invoking his roles as museum-builder and comparative critic, as well as the functional forms he juxtaposed with traditional art in his museum., and under his other arm he holds either an African mask or a mask based on a Picasso painting, both from his collection. His box presents the emotional heart of his museum, the dance mural he commissioned from Matisse.                                     Private Collection -- Commission

Samuel Beckett -- an existentialist perseverance nkisi
Samuel Beckett waits amidst absurdity. In his right hand he brandishes a fountain pen. In his left he holds a working pocket watch with a broken crystal and only one hand. His box presents the set of the second act of Waiting for Godot -- an empty moon in a mirrored sky watches over a bone that stands as a dead tree with plastic leaves growing from it. Among the mbau driven into Beckett are a few typewriter keys, tape machine buttons and recording tape, invoking Krapp’s Last Tapes and the broader act of attempting to remember and edit sense out of a life,  words cannot be created and have no meaning anyway.
                                                                                                                                                                              

Joseph Campbell -- an essentialist nkisi
Mythology scholar Campbell is invoked in communicating the core truth in the the chaos, the articulation of the stream through the mire. Campbell’s mirror box contains the endless multiplication and transparency of the realities of myth. In his right hand Campbell brandishes a larger, but flawed, representative of that inner expansive vision. In his left hand holds a Green Man mask, a traditional European representation of the endless and inevitable cycle of life. His forehead bears the symbol of authority.

Mary Cassatt -- a perseverance nkisi
Artist Cassatt stands for the triumph over unrecognized adversity to create. Her hair (traditional European symbol of female passion) is held in place by the tools of the painter and the engraver. Her mirror box contains the image of the child from Cassatt’s painting of The Boating Party. (While this child is usually interpreted as being amused at the attention of the threatening adult male who stares at her as her mother looks away, in isolation the child’s discomfort at her situation becomes more clear.) Attached to a raffia cord around Cassatt’s waist are dried flowers (European symbol of past beauty and happiness) and sea shells (African symbol of the eternal). Her forehead bears the Adinkra crescent moon of patience and determination. Her body is covered with traditional symbols invoking patience, binding, grandeur, magnanimity, humility, excellence and wisdom.

  
Jack Clarke (no image)

Clarke is presented with the attributes of his different “selves” in balance. His professional sides are represented by the scales of (legal) justice and his telephone (engineer’s) hardhat. (The raised right hand traditionally holds the figure’s brandished weapon which can be used for protection or attack.) These are balanced by the hightop sneakers, basketball (which can be used for offense or defense) and the Hawa’iian “Aloha” Shirt, representing more avocational pursuits.

The abundance of “mbau” (nails/etc) in the figure represent his power or, alternately, the large number of requests for assistance he has received over the years. Attached to some of the mbau are symbols of assistance (the hand), balanced insight (the paired eyes), and Florida (the shell).
Behind the mirror in the belly is the “heart” of the figure, the medicine pack which empowers it. The mirror box which holds that which is closest to his heart, Clarke’s grandchildren.
Private Collection – Commission

A Double Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) -- a perpsective nkisi
Doubleness is natural in the life of Twain/Clemens and he stands for balance amidst chaos. He never succeeded without failing or failed without succeeding. Here the young Clemens/Twain looks into the future, the old Twain into the past. The young lecturer brandishes his writer’s pen in raised hand, holds the celebrity’s cigar at his side. The old victorian gentleman brandishes the cigar, the pen is secondary. But pen and cigar and inseperable, just as the old gent’s white suit and the young hellion’s black suit bleed from side to side. The young man’s mirror box holds the money which he pursued; the old man’s contains the image of young womanhood which was his lifelong ideal, became his lost daughter Suzy, and is embodied here in the form of a coin.     Private Collection

Joseph Conrad -- a cross-cultural literary nkisi
Writer Conrad represents the pursuit of tragic wisdom, the artistic rendering of savagery which lay just beneath the veneer of civilization. In his right hand he brandishes a blooded spear made of a horseshoe crab tail with a “cat-of-five-tails” end of spines that has drawn blood and ink. In his left, Conrad holds the book of incomprehensible scientific law from Heart of Darkness now leather bound and unreadable. His mirror box obscured by haze and grease, also invokes that novel as it presents an ivory white sphere surrounded by Victorian maps of the the area around London, the oft-fogotten heart of darkness of the title. His forehead bears a symbol of authority.

Joseph Cornell -- an artistic nkisi
The first nkisi, artist Cornell intervenes on issues of sculpture of the assemblage of the unnoticed into the artistic. In his right hand he brandishes a pair of scissors (representing his collage work). His left hand hold his mirror box which is the distilled essence of one of his artistic boxes -- the sphere and the hanging ring. Assorted materials adhere to Cornell’s head as he has been fed for a long time.

Walt Disney -- a money through art nkisi
Businessman Disney represents the possibility of financial success through art. In his right hand Disney brandishes a no. 2 pencil on which he has speared dollars. His left hand holds a Mouseketeer cap to cover his nakedness, but his displaced penis returns in his mirror box as a stack of pennies crowned by the ubiquitous mouse ears, dusted with powdered sugar. His forehead bears a traditional symbol for money. His mbau offer found coins.