Carved Wooden Crucifix c. 1939

Vera Van Voris made this carved wooden crucifix, and just imagining her hands at work with the wood is a kind of meditation. It’s hard to know what an artist is thinking, especially across time, but it seems like Vera's relationship to the object must have been deeply intimate; her sensibility, her touch, has coaxed the figure into being. We see the grain of the wood beneath and the way the surface has been worked to suggest texture and form, line and shadow. I think about the history of the cross as an art object, and how it has been handled by so many hands, across so many centuries, each one putting their personal stamp on the visual language. Vera's crucifix speaks to this tradition, but her vision and rendering of suffering is unique. Art making is a way of seeing and feeling, and maybe this object can help us think about all the ways we can look and feel, too.