Samson’s miraculous strength was in his hair. His treacherous wife, Delilah, cut his hair, enabling her people, the Philistines, to capture, blind, and chain him. While imprisoned, his hair grew again and his strength returned. Learning that the Philistines intended to parade their captive in the temple, Samson had himself led between two pillars which […]
Job was heaped with misfortunes and eventually became angry with God. The artist here evokes the rage and bewilderment people can feel at the unevenness of human destiny.
Abraham was ordered by God to take his son Isaac up into Mt. Moriah and sacrifice him. This poignant version shows the father, holding his beloved son to his breast and hiding the sacrificial knife from him, staring up at God in mute, questioning anguish.
On their flight from slavery, the Israelites encountered the Amelechs, a hostile tribe. God told Moses that as long as he held up his arms, his people would prevail. Two elders helped him, but none looked at the battle. The artist saw this as an analogy of all wars.
When Jacob was leading his family and flocks back to his birthplace, he encountered a stranger who fought with him all night, eventually subduing him with a touch on his hip. When he withdrew, the angel renamed him Israel, which means ‘He who strives with God’, implying that perhaps the angel was God.
After the biblical flood, Noah, from the ark he had built at God’s instruction to save two of every kind, sent forth a dove to see if it could find dry land. The keynote of this sculpture is hope that springs eternal.
Cain, son of Adam and Eve, having killed his brother Abel, is sent by God out into the world with an indelible mark on his forehead to proclaim him a fratricide.
Hagar, Abraham’s second wife, is sent out into the desert with her son Ishmael, by first wife Sarah who feared Abraham favoured Ishmael over her son, Isaac. According to legend, the two boys were each the founders of great nations, Ishmael the Arabs and Isaac the Jews.
Cain, son of Adam and Eve, became jealous of his brother Abel because God seemed to favour Abel’s sacrifice of grain over Cain’s of meat, so he slew his brother with a stone.
82cm x 37cm 33cm
Metal (Brass Sheeting) and Resin
1990
“The bush that burns and burns, but is not consumed” – God’s proof to Moses – is the artist’s analogy of the Jewish people, who, despite centuries of persecution climaxing in the fires of the Holocaust, were not destroyed.
