I have been told by many people that my sculptures Lilith’s Flight and Eve’s Awakening are having sex. I have never quite understood why people say that to me. First, bronze metal cannot move, so if you turn your back for a minute, they will not start thrusting away; metal cannot have sex.Secondly, bronze has no genitals; it is not real and not human. And while people can say the sculptures are depicting sex, the stories which inspired their creation did not include sex and I did not create them with the idea of them having sex in mind. And yet people still insist they are engaged in intercourse. I do not know what kind of sex these people have, or how they define it.
In Eve’s Awakening, Eve’s face clearly shows she is terrified and Adam is obviously unconscious and flaccid. I think that if you are a man and wake up in that situation then you should not be surprised if you hear sirens and are arrested after seeing a woman looking at you like that. If you are a woman and wake up to find an unconscious man in your bed that you do not know prompting you to make a face like Eve’s, I suppose you will be dialling 911 as soon as you find your clothes.As for Lilith in Lilith’s Flight, the sculpture is about the politics of sex; thus she is sitting in Adam’s lap but it is not a position from which his genitals can touch hers. Yes, if he were a man and not a sculpture and if he were sitting flat on his bottom, they could have sex if they were feeling adventurous. But Adam is a sculpture and he is on his knees which brings his private parts down lower, so unless I made him hung like a sperm whale there is no way they could have sex. And again in this sculpture Lilith is not interested in him; she has said the name of god and is about to fly away, ending the whole “who should be on top” argument.
And so for those of you who inexplicably believe they are having sex, though it flies in the face of anatomy, in the face of the story which binds the sculptures, in the face of the woman who created them, I hope this puts your misguided ideas to rest. Let me say, I am not prudish, I do not think sex is bad, and in many ancient civilizations that were more egalitarian than ours it was considered sacred, so I would have no problems depicting it. I just don’t think people are ready for the idea of sacred sex (sex as a part of the power of creation and destruction, as a force of joining and dispersing, as natural and normal) when they see prurient images everywhere, even when they aren’t there.
P.S. I would also like to add that people have commented on the largeness of some of my Goddess’s breasts. Yes, they are amply endowed, yet they have breasts not to titillate but because in ancient cultures breasts were seen primarily as the things which feed children. I know that that is a strange way to look at them for some, but all I ask is that you try to see them for their original purpose. Goddess’s breasts were seen as representative of the abundance of food brought from the earth. So, large ones signified a good bounty. That is the way they were depicted in ancient times, and in Indian sculpture; therefore, that is the way I present them. Again, this has nothing to do with sex.
