The Priestess
A standing female figure, carved from pale wood with a raw honey-toned grain, roughly one hundred and forty centimetres tall. Both arms rise vertically, straight toward the sky, parallel, ending in truncated stumps. The hands are gone, and the gesture stays open, held between offering and invocation. The body is nude, raised on legs drawn together like a column, crossed by a long vertical fissure the wood opened on its own. The figure rests on a square plinth of the same pale wood, set directly on the floor.
The one added element is a long necklace of dark, irregular beads that falls from the nape to the lower torso and closes on a small pendant. Robert Bibeau has draped these darkened beads across the blond surface of the carving, and the contrast cuts through the monochrome verticality of the block. The beads shift the reading. A raised figure with lifted arms becomes an adorned presence, marked by an attribute that evokes ritual without naming one.
The effect is one of restrained ceremony. The piece points to no identifiable deity and instead summons the priestly function in a broad sense, a tutelary presence caught in a moment whose liturgy we do not know. The face, modest beneath a few locks of hair, keeps its eyes open. Through its height and its arms reaching upward, the work seems to move toward public format, the one imagined at the threshold of a temple still to be invented.
In the video, The Priestess holds a broom. That broom is a separate work, “The Broom”, shown below.
Related workThe BroomThe piece sits within the long lineage of ritual female sculpture, from the Yoruba to the Senufo, from contemporary neo-pagan priestesses to Niki de Saint Phalle's monumental *Nanas* in which the female figure is restored to her power. Robert Bibeau subtracts Saint Phalle's exuberant colour and substitutes the gravity of patinated pale wood, but keeps the scale and frontality of the standing figure. This is one of the two or three pieces in the corpus whose public format would naturally call for inscription in architecture.