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Maria Wickwire: Once Upon A Time When Women Were Birds

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Published
Aug 19, 2024

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When I began this series, I took off into a new direction where I carved very intuitively and allowed the subtlety of gesture to express emotion.

As the sculptures began to emerge, incomplete, from their solid bases, they each became a woman connected to her bird soul, reminding me of a poem I had read years ago, Once Upon a Time When Women Were Birds. Their hands are prominent as a reflection of how powerful our hands are to help us caress, connect, protect and hold what we most value or push aside what no longer serves us. Their wings remind of our power both physically and spiritually to rise and thrive while still remaining grounded in our lives.



“Once upon a time, when women were birds,

there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk

was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten,

that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice


Maria Wickwire — Artist’s Statement


My process of making sculpture is a creative journey, a quest for evoking memory and emotion which invite viewers to interact and contribute their interpretations. It is also a quest for discovering the stories that bring meaning to life. The textural markings on my sculptural forms express our inner experience, which we might also read in each other, if we only knew how to look.I work with the most elemental of materials: clay, story, and human form. Clay is the oldest material we humans have used to express ourselves. Only our stories are older. And even before we began to tell our stories, there were our bodies, standing as witnesses to our lives and recording every experience in their cells, the way the rings of a tree record its life. Capturing the gesture and mood in a human figure is endlessly fascinating to me.


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