Scribe
dated 2013
cast resin, black iron, acrylic paint
H:34 1/2” x L:32 1/2” x W:18 1/4” (88 cm x 83 cm 46 cm)

Transposed from a figural representation in painting, this sculpture of a young girl astride a Trojan horse embodies a fascination with an archetypal image of adolescence. Joy Mallari rendered this young girl who is at the cusp of womanhood, calm and quiet resolve. She conjured the plot of a story by way of contrast between figuration and other compositional elements.

This character first appeared in a painting that is a scene of surreal destruction, a pivot of calm amidst discord. She rides a crystalline horse, reigning over a scene of chaos. Thus, she can be a character from a picture-book, a myth, a virtual game; her plausible origins are endless.

While the visual elements of narrative are absent in Mallari’s sculptural renditions of this figure, she conveys the scene through figural pose and tension, the lifelike image, and the ornaments that prop her form. The use of resin and the reproduction casting allows replicating itself and aids our understanding of narrative and scene through material, form and consummate technique. The movement between two-to-three dimensionality examines the rudiments of lifelikeness and perceptions of reality. The sculpture moreover places the figure in kinetic space given to closer and greater scrutiny.

In this piece as well as the illustrations and paintings where Joy Mallari’s representations of young girls figure, we sense the thread that links narrative and image, language and art, reality and imagination. Joy Mallari succeeds through this transposition from pictorial to sculptural modes in bringing to light our active engagement of forms through experience, by way of a “world of feeling”, a sphere which art powerfully constructs for us.