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Lovers of the Saint John night

    What runs below is a story I never narrated on my website. About one of my works I am most proud of.     Could it be Mars and Venus ? Looking at it, my founder thought it was Vulcan’s nest trapping the two lovers, while the Olympians were hasting hither with “great Homeric laughters”. Mind you, however playfully I may be dealing with his view, my reaction is yet totally devoid of any wickedness or scoffing. Others may see the roundness of a nest they may peer into, the inward parts of a flower … Others, sense, at the heart of that spherical fretwork, something evocative of the centre of the world, of a primeval fusion; and after all, is it not the origin of the world (see page 39) ?     But since that St John’s day –on the fine morning of 24 June 1999- when my founder –a god, Vulcan, nay, Atlas- in a most splendid gesture swung the sphere off his shoulder to land it in my studio … their name could not but be “The Lovers of the St John’s day” : they had reached that yearly climax of light and fire. And “how not to take leave of one’s senses” as the endless unfurling of a waltz works it magic upon you, with its impulsive forces, its breath, with its flames that coil around the lovers, with its blaze where they keep progressing, spinning around ? Burning bush … and for many, the blaze in the statue of Joan of Arc that I had in progress, her fire nuptials.     To tell the truth, nine months earlier, I had had to seize the opportunity of a quite clumsy and unpleasant, stingy and scornful order … that would have the figure of a couple should serve as a glass-table leg. As if one of my sculpture about femininity could be set stark and stiff into a Caryatid. Certainly not; instead, it should be integrated, free, in a load-bearing structure that would itself be fretwork. In short, a challenge verging on unfeasible and technically formidable. Then followed a long winter, very long indeed : the foundry caught fire -though my Joan of Arc managed to escape the blaze (!) , the impatient customer had decided to prosecute me, a woman decided to be the next purchaser of my work … All such events liable to restore the man and woman to their happiness, the couple to its grace, free and moving and lively in their “burning bush”. At which stage I remembered Pablo Neruda’s words : “…the day weaves and unweaves its celestial net where time, salt, noises, drives, roads, man and woman, and winter on earth intermingle.”
(Translated from French by Michèle Bustros)