SusanHenge

I love the repetition of this piece of sculpture – it reminds me of music.

Of course, I’ve been fascinated by palaeolithic art all my life – cave paintings, fertility figures, stone circles … even musical instruments carved from animal bones. Imagine playing a song from a flute carved out of a swan’s wing!! There’s something so true and real and lasting about these early pieces of art that blows my mind. They are free of much of the conceptualising that goes on around modern art – they are raw and real and simple – perhaps because they were made in the very childhood of humanity itself.

I created the individual figures for this piece after seeing the Venus of Willendorf in Vienna in 2007. The brazenness of her flowing curves really inspired me. It was the day after I saw Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss for the first time which also gave me the idea for writing Four Hands Around One Heart which features on my new EP Incandescence (https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/incandescence-ep/id912815627) … I knew I had to change my life that weekend and live it more authentically. I’d heard some of the most exquisite music of my life the night before – a young Chinese woman had dragged an upright piano on a flat board with wheels right into the middle of the square and proceeded to play Chopin and Beethoven with such electric passion and abandon that she drew literally hundreds of mesmerised onlookers of every age and possible persuasion. I even saw a tough looking gang of street kids stop and take it all in rather shyly.

Listening to that woman play under the stars of that deep blue spring night changed me forever. I made a promise to myself – and most importantly, to my son – that we would live our lives in whatever way we needed to, in whatever way was true for us, and I’ve been trying to make that happen every second since.

What a destiny-altering weekend! Gustav Klimt showed me what I needed – and that woman with the piano showed me how to get there. And to think that the artist who created the Venus of Willendorf, despite her anonymity, is still influencing people like me 30,000 years down the track!!

What we create has the power to change things in the world, no doubt about it – and maybe even to go on changing it long after we’re gone. I believe in the healing power of beauty … and I believe in its potential to radiate like an unstoppable ripple of good karma across the earth – and far away into history.

Susan Muranty, October 2014