ÜGLY
The Priestess: slender wooden figure, arms raised, cut flat and without hands, long necklace of black beads, flat base, white backdrop, work by Robert Bibeau

The Priestess

A standing female figure, roughly one hundred and forty centimetres, carved from pale wood with a raw grain. Both arms rise vertically, parallel, ending in stumps: the hands are gone, and the gesture stays held between offering and invocation. A long vertical fissure, opened by the wood itself, runs through the nude body. The one added element, a necklace of dark beads, falls from the nape to the lower torso and cuts through the blond verticality of the block. A tutelary presence, caught in a moment whose liturgy we do not know.

Rear three-quarter view of the pale wood figure, from the raised arm down to the thighs, the grain running along flank and hip, the piece propped against dark red fence boards at the corner of a brick wall
Full-length profile, the head cut off by the top edge, down to the leg standing on gravel, a long split running the length of the torso and the raised arm rising behind, between red fence boards and brick
Close-up of the head turned three-quarters, hair carved into long strands streaked with black, two small dark blue beads set into the eyes, and the raised arms framing the face against the fence and brick wall
Video

In the video, The Priestess holds a broom. That broom is a separate work, “The Broom”, shown below.

The BroomRelated workThe Broom
Reading notes

From the priestesses of ritual traditions to Niki de Saint Phalle's *Nanas*, the standing female figure carries a frontal power. Here exuberant colour gives way to the gravity of pale wood; the scale, though, already calls for the threshold of a temple still to be invented.