SUMMARY

Maria Wickwire is an accomplished Skagit Valley ceramic artist. The original large scale, ceramic Anillos was broken to pieces and returned to her in a police evidence box. She painstakingly reconstructed Anillos, this time to serve as a form for bronze, and she honored its history by inserting real gold in the cracks using a technique called kintsugi. The rings in the skin tell the woman’s life story like rings of a tree, and her cracks demonstrate the power of rebirth and healing in a fractured world.

ABOUT THE SCULPTURE

In 2001, Maria made a small ceramic sculpture, Rings, inspired by a little child in the Cirque de Soleil who was all dressed in white, like a blank sheet of paper that hadn’t been written on yet. Amid all the color and music and activity of the circus, this little girl sat like a pool of peace and Maria couldn’t take her eyes off the girl. When she made that sculpture, the figure had a little life experience written into her skin, represented by the textured growth rings around her which suggest the rings of a tree. Maria believes our bodies store our life experiences in our cells. If we could read each other like we can read a tree’s rings, maybe compassion would result from it.

In 2005, Maria was invited to make a public art piece based on Rings. Anillos (growth rings in Spanish) was a more mature figure with more texture from more life experience. It took Maria a year to create Anillos using thick coils of clay and borrowing a large kiln to fire her. She was installed in Lake Oswego, Oregon as part of their permanent collection and remained there for 12 years — until someone rocked her off her pedestal and shattered her. After a year or so in 2020, the police released the broken pieces to Maria in an evidence box, during the pandemic.

Anillos’ wounding reminded Maria of the shattering going on around us as we tried to figure out what to believe and how to heal, though Anillos could also be seen as the wounding of an individual. Maria thought she might be able to repair Anillos enough to have her cast in bronze and to highlight the repaired seams in the manner of the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, where ceramics are repaired by using gold to actually highlight and honor the scars. This adds another layer to Anillos’ life experience. Maria offers this new creation to encourage the power of healing in our fractured world.

ABOUT THE SCULPTOR

Maria has made and shown her figurative sculptures in the Pacific Northwest since around 2000, beginning in Portland, Oregon. She now lives and works in the Skagit Valley, Washington. Her process of making sculpture is a creative journey, a quest for evoking memory and emotion which invites viewers to interact and contribute their interpretations.

“I work with the most elemental of materials: clay, story, and human form. Clay is the oldest material we humans have used to express ourselves. Only our stories are older. And even before we began to tell our stories, there were our bodies, standing as witnesses to our lives and recording every experience in their cells, the way the rings of a tree record its life. Capturing the gesture and mood in a human figure is endlessly fascinating to me. The textural markings on my sculptural forms express our inner experience, which we might also read in each other, if we only knew how to look.”