Witness I

Stoneware clay, brick, clay slip, h, 242mm.

The Witness does not act. The Witness endures.

It is the entity left standing when the noise subsides — an archive of presence. Not a participant, not a catalyst, but a vessel of perception. It sees, absorbs, and accumulates time like sediment. The Witness is the one who survives — possibly damaged, possibly mute, but aware. In this role, the head is not just a symbol of cognition; it is an antenna of the past, holding stories it may never voice.

This reclining head does not assert. It does not resist. Instead, it registers — everything. The drift of events, the slow attrition of identity, the falling away of meaning. And in its refusal to intervene, it becomes something oddly sacred: a custodian of memory, untouched by the urgency to be heard.

This crude and simple head seeds a future theme for sculptural exploration of ‘Witness’.  It is the least technological of the themes that have emerged — it leans toward the archetypal, the human, even the post-human. The figures in the forthcoming series may appear more worn, more ambiguous — pre-verbal or post-narrative, marked by time rather than action.