henry moore sculpture centre

11 figures, wombs of stone, like the charred of auschwitz, eyes dug from death before death was named, lie strewn, almost casually, disregarding.

11 figures, neither of word nor opposed, without memory, without dreams, lie on their random pedestals, in a gallery of moors with night for walls, indifference for a ceiling, unmeasured time for a floor.

11 figures, as if they are acquainted not through anything resembling knowledge but in their geometric relations and the nature of their eyes which do not meet, lie in a gallery, without purpose, uncouth.

11 figures, though in a space that could be fathomless, seem to consume space, not through any sight, for no one sees, but through the presence of a quality that might be a function of their being stone.

11 figures, of a poverty so vast they would be saints if it weren’t for the lack of word and regard and function, lie in silence as you do in hope and pain.

Their faces—though this is too friendly a name for what might be claimed to be an aspect of their uncanny heads—somehow point to the palette of the human heart, without colour, expression, experience or capacity.

11 figures, notwithstanding their lack of legal rights and freedoms, are chained to a law that knows no rights, to a freedom that resembles black’s freedom to be black.

11 figures, belonging to various clubs of dismemberment and mutilations so unorthodox we might recognize them only when mad or in the pit of love, lie, as if they are exhausted by their very immobility.

11 figures, with holes for brains and hearts and eyes and gods, are and have been—though to be is too strong a word for such conditions and are and have been require a tense not yet available in language—of this gallery bereft of names and limits and will be.

11 figures, women, erotic in their unattractiveness, some wearing dresses, others outside of fashion, are as if they themselves were born of something that preceded stone.

11 figures lie—can we say in wait in such conditions?—and could we—if we were ever capable of entering a space that wasn’t full of waiting—say what lies so heavily upon them, who lack our hearts?