The Sculptures of Nijole Sivickas.

AuthorDiaz, Hector Pena
PositionAspects of Expressions

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Man was dust, earthen vase, on eyelid of tremulous loam, the shape of clay he was Carib jug, Chibcha stone, imperial cup or Araucanian silica ... --Pablo Neruda

Born in the small Lithuanian town of Kedainiai, Nijole Sivickas has been living in Bogotá for more than a half century. There, she has given shape to a singular body of sculpture that--like any other exceptional work--defies classification and contrast. Sivickas is by all measures authentic both in her personal life and in her sculptures. She has freed herself through her creating hands, through her contact with the inert, with the most basic materials. She has not sought refuge in the contrivance of what is considered cultural and, against all protocol, she leaves before our eyes creatures forged from clay, metal, and rope that escape any traditional definition of the art critic.

The first evidence of this is the materials she uses in her work. The primary medium is clay, older than human life, a metaphor that anticipates what is human and contains it, like houses and pots cooked in tire. Like the challenges of the first humans who were confronted with the nature of things and the needs of life, perhaps in a similar way, the artist faces the imperative of transforming the material, as if she herself is the tire, the flowing water, as if she cannot separate herself from what she is creating, like human beings created in the image of God.

Nijole goes back to the beginning and to the medium which, in her hands, leaves the unnamed world and becomes a sign, a heartbeat, a new voice in the silence of forms. It is not possible to separate the work from the materials it contains or the tools that shape it, much less from the artist with which these things merge in the process of sculpting.

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There are no such separations; no discourse. There is a world that is transformed and integrated into new realities that escape the confines of the word. The elements sleep a motionless, timeless sleep. They are prisoners of an amorphous eternity. But then there is an encounter with hands and an experience of what is human that will change them to a different phase, one they have never known. The hands awaken the clay and its hardness is dissolved in places where the artist's senses begin to forge something that did not exist before, a creation that needs her penetrating gaze so that it can live a full life. The tire does its work. Mixing and projecting that...

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