The Caress of the Goddess

Capo Vaticano – October–November 1999

A tree sculpture made by de-structuring, with “gutimo” grass, wood and wool. Photos by anTheòs

I love this work very much – apparently simple and practically unknown – made with a bundle of “gutimo”, found “by chance” during a walk at Santa Maria di Ricadi, near Tropea, in Calabria.

I later learned that this very strong fibre was used to make ropes…

For a month, in the magical solitude of Capo Vaticano, right in front of the petrified profile of Manto – the mythical Prophetess who seems immersed up to her head in the waves – I stripped the gutimo, strictly by hand, until it was reduced to the finest threads…

The poetic action was born like this, the fresh cascade of grass being the link between Mother Earth and the “living”.

Very close to the sea, in the November warmth that can be so mild in those places, the participants, lying down one at a time on the grass beneath the work, could receive directly on their skin, golden from the autumn sun, the Caress of the Goddess…

A work in synergy with the poem of the same title published in the book UNIVERSI.

Some of Teri’s poems act as a counterpoint to her paintings or performances. Heightening feeling and vision nonetheless leaves the different modes of expression independent of one another: the poems are not meant to describe the other works, nor are the latter meant to illustrate the former. What matters is the balance, the happy union that is created, the synergy that arises, in that attempt to achieve the harmony and beauty at the heart of all Teri’s research.

An ephemeral work?

But it is precisely transience, which is in the natural order of things, that teaches us to enjoy life, here and now…

And then, as Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, perhaps true eternity does not belong to the works of human beings, however monumental – all of them, even the grandest, are destined to fall into ruin –

true eternity belongs to the rose which, despite its extreme fragility, is reborn again and again, for ever, covering those ruins.

Is this, perhaps, the meaning of my small, very sweet Caress?

Teri Volini