Musical Muse

Something extraordinary about the white Alabaster stone is its deafening stillness. Viv has said that collectors of her work talk about the 'company' of these sculptures and the positive energy that emanates from them. They demand attention, even if that attention is not given by actually looking at them. I felt this 'presence' particularly strongly with Musical Muse. This sculpture is small and focused, the representation of a head is only apparent when looking at one third of it, while the rest of it feels quite abstract.

It seems to belong to another era. For those of you who are familiar with the Vorticist movement (a British version of Futurism in the 1910s) and the early sculptures of Jacob Epstein, you might find in this work a similar sense of mass and of control. In many of Viv's works, she seeks to capture the transient and the ephemeral in the permanency of the stone, in this work the 'muse' is still and fixed.

In the absolute whiteness of the sculpture, a poignant stillness is felt.