CAN’T FORGET HER (LEGS) - A piece about Female Objectification and Mortality. A hand carved Carrara marble sculpture. Height 30 cm x width 102 cm x depth 32 cm and weight ca. 80 kg.
CAN’T FORGET HER (LEGS) is a pair of marble sculptured life-sized woman's legs casually placed on the floor. As if a woman is silently lying in the room, patiently waiting for the viewer’s attention, and for one’s thoughts to go back to her - like a melancholic memory.
The work CAN’T FORGET HER (LEGS) is about transiency, human mortality and the desire to escape from this. On a lighter side the work expresses the impermanence and remembrance of an ended love affair.
The woman is captured for eternity in imperishable marble. She is not to be erased from the mind of others and not from life itself.
Still the work shows her loneliness. It is quite sad and painful to realise that this - her not being forgotten - is what she secretly was longing for but that her legs - her body - became the object to be remembered.
Is this the price women pay for being perceived as sensually attractive - to become the trophy for others due to the objectification of women in society?
The work was already about mortality, and a wink to ended love affairs, but became even more about the appealingness of a woman’s body and the female objectification.
The execution of CAN'T FORGET HER (LEGS) took more than six months. First a clay model was made, then the sculpture was carved by hand out of Carrara marble. A continuous process of the artist working together with the sculptors.
The greatest care has been given to create exactly the right pose for the most seductive yet sophisticated and realistic appearance for which multiple films and photos were shot, making this piece more realistic and even more personal.
The artist chose which details to add and which to leave out to maximise the emotions and the association of realistic sensual-melancholic poetry.
Crucial was the shape of the sloping upper knee. The course of the muscles and bones.
The extraordinary and stylish shape of the fashionable Miu Miu sling-back shoes make this woman a contemporary - not historical - object of desire. Notice the little detail of the toes and the refinement in the high heels - with the risk of breaking.
An important point of attention was choosing the right point on the buttocks where the legs were cut off from the female body - as if it was real flesh.
Only the first part of the buttocks is visibly just enough to give the viewer subtle sexual associations but in such a way that the sculpture does not become vulgar, but continuously feels sophistically seductive, and poetic. Yet the straight-cut side is like a sharp undertone.
By combining female beauty and softness, with realistic details and this almost lurid association of cut of flesh, the sculpture evokes contrasting emotions, through which a palpable and fascinating tension can be felt.
A cotton bed sheet can be placed under the sculpture to increase even more the realism and poetry of the work.
