Pan

 

 

                                        Pan Ceramic clay, deer antler, gold paint.

                                                        Hand built 1995.

                                                Broken 1998, 2000, 2005

                                                Rebuilt and mounted 2021.

 

 

 

Way, way back in the previous century @1995 I was attending a small and conservative Christian University ( that is a whole other story).  I was the oddball out but most people tolerated me and many were kind, though I didn't make any lasting friends. Mostly I hid out in the relatively liberal Art Building that was thankfully away from the main campus.  My ceramics  teacher, Tim Malm, was a particular favourite.  He made allowances for my weird ideas and never tried to steer me into more traditional forms.  At some point I had the idea to make a wearable mask of Pan, the Greek God of the wild, and other things.  Possibly fueled by my obsession with Tom Robbins novel, "Jitterbug Perfume".

In order to make my idea real, I needed antlers.  Real ones, from a real deer.  All of my Uncles are/were hunters so naturally I polled them about the possibility of sourcing a pair of small antlers, preferably shed naturally.  They laughed, of course.  My Uncles were not so nearly accepting of my weird ideas.  I was a vegetarian at the time and they made good sport of teasing me and tricking me into eating animal products.  What they saw as teasing, I saw as bullying.  I wasn't very popular.  Eventually one of them did send me a small set of antlers.  I didn't ask from where, but I did hope that my application of them onto an art piece would in some way honor the animal they came from.

So I made my ode to Pan, fit to my face.  The mask hung on my wall for three years, then it  fell off one night scaring me half to death.  It's a sizeable hunk of ceramic. It broke in a couple of pieces, I glued them back together and rehung it.  A few years after that it fell off the wall again, then it was broken in a move and lived in a ziplock baggy  for a couple of decades.  When I found it a few weeks ago I was astonished to see that the hanging points were intact and most of the pieces were there but the antlers were missing.  Eventually I located those too and set about reworking the piece.  I mounted it a padded box and used the Japanese technique of kintsukuroi to reform the face.

He's been through a lot, but he's a piece of art that has been with me a long time. I'm glad he's back and I hope he stays on the wall this time!