The Gates
It’s almost a bereavement completing a big project after several months. You’ve suddenly got to look elsewhere for meaning and purpose, and after a few hundred days one can become very dependent on the feeling of having an outlet, having something to do.
You also become much more aware of your surroundings. In this case, the process is doubly jarring, as I awaken from my trance to the reality of a prison sentence that still has a couple of years left on it.
It’s the spring of 2016, and I’ve just completed a prison themed homage in soap to Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell”. In the absence of entertainments sufficiently distracting to lift the gloom, I may as well tell the story of this unusual, malformed piece.
I say mal-formed, because I had more than a few challenges with the soap. I had never carved it before I came to prison, and so there were more than a few challenges in getting the correct finishes and textures up to scratch and even now I must confess the occasional pang of regret that things didn’t work out better.