Woman 1949

Reg Butler forged this ‘Woman’ in iron. I imagine him coaxing these rigid lengths into something that breathes, something that trembles with an inner life. I want to talk about touch. About what it means to feel the weight of that metal, the heat in the forge. Look how the iron is stretched and pinched into a figure. The texture alone is a story of making, a record of the hand. I see a seated figure, an iron age goddess perhaps, with an elongated torso like a Giacometti, and maybe a touch of Picasso in the abstracted form. That tall, elegant stalk shooting up past the figure’s head, it makes me think of the many ways in which the linear can be pictorial. There is a conversation going on here, an intimate exchange between the artist’s hands and the material, between one artist and another, and finally between the sculpture and us.