I had seen and was intrigued by porcelain figurines of dancers from the T’ang dynasty, the way each one captured the perfect moment of grace of a gesture, and together how they set each other in motion. My first viewing of a major group of them I recall as having taken place in 1978 Paris at the Musée Guimet & the Louvre. I was thinking about the T’ang dancers as I did the first small piece in 1979 of“Balancing Act”, and also as I made “Merry Christmas Bernard”. Then I continued to make small sculptures in 1980 and1981, inspired by both sound and movement. Like the T’ang dancers, they’re intended to be poses and gestures in relatively subtle reaction to sound, in a sense configurations of a certain sensuous moment of anti-gravity sparked by sound.
The idea of making a group of them crystallized in 1982, and this group was first exhibited in the faculty show at the school in December1982. The space allows for the leaning, pointing, flow of surfaces, hopefully enough so that the viewer can assign their own perception of an identity to the pieces – knowledge of the T’ang pieces is not necessary.
It was actually exciting to have the corner of one piece break off due to a fossil in the stone, which was a small beautifully “s”-curved shark’s tooth. It was a rose-grey color with a porcelain-like surface covering its sinuous swaying shape. It was the pared-down version of what I wanted the stones to be, so when the group was first displayed together in Dec ’82, I hung the tooth from the ceiling of the studio, so it hovered over the corner of the sculpture where it came from, i.e. the original bed of the fossil.