SCULPTURES OF SORROW
The article is written by CHRIS HALL
It is published in
Images of Earth & Spirit,a Recurgence art anthology
edited by John Lane and Satish Kumar
green books 2003




I SAT IN MARIANNE´s spacious studio on my journey from Stockholm to Gothenburg, quite unprepared for what was placed before my senses. Each sculpture was a call to contemplate, a mantra to meditate.

I was a reluctant witness to a moment of deep emotion. Exactly what was happening or what had happened wasn’t clear, but a woman stood in vigil over a partner lying tense and inert before her. It was a spectacle of heart-rending grief. Their features were oriental, but their predicament was universal .Indeed, they embodied a truth that encompasses all our futures and even the fate of all existence. The nadir, when life mysteriously seeps away. That moment of poise when there can be no explanation, no justification, and creation rests at the still point of imperceptible movement, resembling extinction.

In a quiet suburb of Västerås there was time to allow the deepest human pain to penetrate. A disturbing challenge to recognize and accept images lying at the core of our existence. Yes, to acknowledge the pain of wounds that lie almost too deep for our tears. One image might have been enough to prise open my calloused sensibilities. Yet, with every successive figure, a new hurt was witnessed and painfully accepted. To know such pain is vital to our being, but everything within us will seek to deny it, avoid it, push it away, cover it up.

Ultimately all true art becomes transcendent. I continued to reflect and sift through what remained of my intimate encounter with the distilled nature of Marianne’s figures – each one insisting on an unusually intense quality of attention to a particularly profound level of pain from a source of collective experiences that were mined from the archaic depths of the unconscious, with an uncanny precision and poignancy.

Marianne also makes masks. Sheets of grey clay are pressed outwards with the utmost sensitivity, emanating the blissful serenity of Khmer sculpture. So much peace flows from these presences Marianne has said that the pressure from her finger tips gradually and deliberately reveals the light through the emerging cracks. Here is yet another challenge to our conception of a peerless beauty: the incipient disintegration of the Buddha-like mask

I marvel at Marianne’s achievement, her search for the expression of what lies so deeply buried within the human psyche and the discovery of a fitting context in which to reveal this. It follows that, given the peace and tranquillity of a space set apart, these indelble images generate their own ambience. But they do so eloquently ask for their own sacred precinct. Perhaps by their very nature they will seek and find it in our hearts .