This work is part of our DARING window installation and is available for collection or delivery from 16 December 2024. Please contact us below for sales enquiries.

Curatorial+Co.’s highly anticipated end of year small works show, DARING (previously Darlings), invites artists to colour outside the lines of their practice through exploration, risk and play. Be bold, be brave, be DARING.

Says Deborah of this work, “This is the only bronze work of my entire career, devised and cast at the Kirsten Kjaers Museum in northwestern Denmark in 2017 under the supervision of sculptor Zoran Luka.

“The work began as beeswax, and my initial intention was to fashion a small mermaid. However, the material seemed to have its own steadfast opinions. The figure that emerged was related instead to representations of Venus emerging from the water, wringing her hair dry, and to the Magdalene in her hirsute phase when she was becoming a prophet, seeing visions in the desert.

“The wax effigy was immersed in plaster of Paris; the plaster entered the kiln where the wax ran off, then the remaining negative space was filled with molten bronze, the first metal known to humans. This is the ‘lost wax’ technique, first developed more than 5,000 years ago in the Indus Valley.

“Once the big white cylinder emerged from the kiln and cooled, the plaster was chipped away to reveal the sculpture- as soon as I grasped her, she cut open my thumb and then I understood that she was in fact a weapon. Like all gods, it has been said.

“In addition to the fine pelt covering her legs, she has six breasts, like a dog. So she’s a bitch-goddess, triumphant and shameless.

“You can see from the gleam that her breasts and vulva have been rubbed for centuries, in hope and supplication, for luck and love.

“She is part of the long, wandering exploration of religion and religiosity that has been a recurring theme of my artistic practice since I was a child.

“I cast a food-safe silicon mould from the bronze, with the idea that echoes of this small deity could be produced in edible form, perhaps as chocolate.

“Obviously, the idea of eating god is directly appropriated from my ancestral faith, Catholicism. And yet a decadent, delicious, delerious deity suggests mischevious repudiation of all the misogyny, homophobia and pleasure-denial that characterizes that religion’s teachings and culture.”