ABSTRACT
Quinn had to some extent been prompted to make his Self portrait by his encounter with William Blake's life mask, on display in the Tate Gallery. This object has also been cited as a motivating inspiration by another contemporary sculptor, Antony Gormley, for whom it formed an intensely moving, living presence. In terms of the process of interaction between the artist and object it may be understood as a form of sculptural chrysalis with a rigid outer casing containing a living form within, a state not immediately apparent to the eye but realised through perception. Gormley records as a child reacting to the evocative presence of Blake's mask which as an adult he later described as containing 'a pressure inside the dome of the scalp and then also this pressure behind the eyes which gave the work a kind of potency'.6 This analysis of the mask as well as the formulation of his own sculptural process and aesthetic clearly relates to both his training as an anthropologist, as well as a spiritual development that emerged from his Catholic upbringing and subsequent engagement with Buddhism that now permeates all that he does.7 The sculptor's rigid body cases, such as Sound II (1986)8;, convey as John Hutchinson has noted 'a shamanic aspect to the ritual of self-entombment that is the first step in [their] making .... - a kind of rehearsal of death'.9 And indeed these are aloof, isolated and, in terms of the inner body, apparently impenetrable except through the transformational imaginative act. Such encounters parallel those
public display of Lenin's body with calls for it to be removed and buried. 4 M. Parker Pearson explores this notion of 're-presentation' in his introduction to
The Archaeology of Death and Burial (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), p. 4. 5 Ibid.,p.71.
