The Pieta

The Pieta

This piece is a deliberate volte face of Michaelangelo’s masterpiece. Instead of depicting the pathos and tragedy of a limp corpse in the arms of a grieving mother Balcomb’s piece evokes a quietly controlled, peaceful, open-faced, unapologetic, will to life and power. Her forward posture, back-stretched arms, and loosening bands across the chest suggest that she is straining at all that limits and prevents her from the fullness of life that awaits her. She knows exactly where she is going and what is preventing her from getting there. But her efforts are not flailing and desperate. Instead of manifesting in furrowed brow, bent shoulders, and grimacing mouth, her expression is relaxed, her eyes and mouth half open. Her striving is restful. While her intentions are clearly transparent, her will is not promethean, as in one of Balcomb’s other pieces – Son of Man – but focused and circumspect. The slight tilt of the head, upward and sideways, as if glancing away from the goal that is in front of her, and directed, perhaps, towards the viewer, suggests that she is not totally consumed by this goal and recklessly selfish in attaining it. Indeed there is a kind of ecstasy about her. She is striving but she is also beyond striving. She is striving but she is not striving blindly. The camera on her head, which startles the viewer at first because of the peculiarity of its presence, affirms this. And she knows she is not alone in her striving, because we are all striving. So she invites us to join her, to see how she is doing it as she herself is seeing how she does it, through the camera that continuously scrutinizes, both inwardly and outwardly, her life’s path. She has nothing to hide. Her striving is the striving of all humanity. Her features, genderless and non-racial, suggest a certain universality about her humanness. Though obviously a woman she is first and foremost a human being, a strong human being, appealing to all other human beings also to be strong, to be free of the shackles that bind them, to reach towards the fullness that awaits them – with intensity but also with introspection, with determination but also with peace, with assurance but also with open-ness. One cannot help but be inspired by this extraordinary human being that is before us. She is emerging, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, out of slavery and into mastery. As we all should be.