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"My sculptures are myself – or rather, my-selves. They are casts from my own body, but no two are the same. Each one occupies a different place, and each one bears within it a different charge. To bear means to carry or uphold; but it also means to go towards a certain goal or destination. A boat, carrying its cargo, is said to move on a 'bearing'; and we also talk of a woman or a man having a certain 'bearing' in the way that she or he carries herself/himself, as perhaps with determination or dignity in deportment. So, even though they each stand still, my sculptural figures display the bearings of own outward and inward experiences as I have moved through a changeable world, often marked by violent events. And yet they bear these serenely, despite all that they have gone through and all that has gone through them.

To those maidens who bore up their temples the Greeks gave the name 'caryatids'; my sculptural figures, too, may be so called; but as caryatids who bear witness and testimony to ruined space and ravaged times around them. And well might we call them so, for me as an architect; and if I turn from building to body it is only towards a more primal core to the world we extend around us. That core in architecture was the column, modeled on figures of men and women in Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders that were iterated and arranged to mark and watch over all our relations in space. Like coins, letters, seals and imprints, a column can both distribute general rule yet also affirm an original motive in its motif, admitting in each iteration some leeway for variation, leeway that shows the scope of freedom.

Casts, too, can display this scope. Casts are 3D prints, and like prints, casts are not always identical. Etchings vary within editions, and Andy Warhol's ways with silk-screens ensured that, though repeated like the media icons that they hijacked, no two Marilyns or Jackies from his 'Factory' were ever the same. Likewise, numbers, flags, hand and skull-prints recur through Jasper Johns' works, but vary continually. Cindy Sherman is a mistress of variation; she poses alter-egos of herself in guises that never quite disguise their posing. My soap, epoxy, sugar, wax, and now cast-iron figures share something with each of these, but differ from them in two important ways.

Firstly, they are not at all 'cool'. They are far from the ironies of post-Pop Art. Their repetitions are not of media clichés, but primal iterations of "I am...", cast in varying materials and colors through a series of immediate responses to existential moments of experience. In this, they are kin to Louise Bourgeois figures. They confront and challenge us not to identify our own selves with them; their call to bodily empathy can scarcely be declined.

A second distinction of my figures is that they stand not alone in my works, but mark - as columns do - definite poles around which all my other actions swirl, sometimes with demonic energy in political anger, sometimes with passionate self-searching, as in my performance with the bell-tower of the iron-cast bells "President of Crimea, since 19th of March 2014"'; but also – in my watercolors on the papers received from migration offices – in dancing flares of ecstatic freedom. My watercolors, like my soap pillar with the cast-iron cast inside “Little Mermaid”, float loose, unbound from borders, all bearings open upon a future sea of freedom".

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From the diary, dreams about Mermaids:

"...I had escaped from conflict in the distant southeast of our civilization. I found myself in Malmö, I hoped that in the West there would be no dictatorship, no wars, and no persecutions for being a woman. But I found that I could not cease my wanderings; so I fled even further towards the gates of western civilization – to Liverpool on the Mersey River in England. A great international port was built there, sending liners and ships on ocean voyages with people of all kinds, united in search of a better life. Frequently their destination was New York. Liverpool was known for its migrants, who came there for the "American Dream" and fueled industrial capitalism. It held stories of railways, steamships and works that set the course of modern civilization.

There, a century ago, Joseph Lever created from African palm oil a soap that entered every home. Its profits were a capitalist triumph; but with them Lever also built an art gallery amid a unique new community, named after his soap: Port Sunlight. It was an idealized expression of life for workingclass families. But with Lever's death the ideal withered. Capitalism never commits to anything or any place. Although Lever's company still makes soap at Port Sunlight, during the 1920s it became Unilever, and moved its headquarters away from Liverpool.

It was while I was in Liverpool, designing a project for a soap sculpture to stand by the Mersey river at Seacombe near Port Sunlight, that I discovered a terrible irony: It is the horrible use of that helpful and gentle material in the development of guns and weapons, from which I had sought escape. I found that in Sweden, one of Europe's most civilized countries, in a factory which once produced the same 'Sunlight' soap, blocks of human-size soap are being shot at in testing new guns. For it seems that soap is a perfect simulacrum for human flesh, to display the violent damage done by bullets to bodies. Those guns and bullets are then sent to conflict zones, causing multitudes of people to leave their homes, to look for a new place for living, to run to where there are still ports, not just closed borders, in search of their fugitive dream.

Now I dream every day, looking for my own new home to recreate my lost native heaven at the edge of the Earth. I'm seeking a new paradise, a real New World, and so as to find out whether we are suited to each other, to test each potential place of new life for myself, I should first install a soap column on an invisible border at that site – whether at the barbed-wire gate to the lost world of my old home in the Edge of the Earth, or on the shores of Malmö, across the Öresund from the sculpture of Andersen's Little Mermaid, or at Seacombe on the Mersey shore, where so many landed or left in search of some real and better new world.

My soap columns, which will slowly wash away to reveal hidden figures inside them, will be symbolic gestures, political metaphors for the histories of not only transient port cities, but for the fragility and value of every person's fleeting life on our Earth..."

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