The seed of the inspiration came about when my boss made a rare visit to our shop and showed us results from a new toy he had, a metal cutter complete with a preprogrammed series of designs. He had a huge Harley Davidson logo in thick aluminum. This got me thinking. What if I could create a similar design that would work using positive and negative space? I started with a photo of a statue in the Cairo museum, of Horus and Set blessing Ramesses III:
Horus and Set with Ramesses the Third seen at the Global Egyptian Museum website, housed in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo Granite, height 195cm, width 72cm, originally found at Medinet Habu
An interesting passage in the Pyramid texts relates:
And thus the Khepera scarab in my piece is rising like Ra.
I could have chosen all sorts of metals, but I wanted something durable, something that I could envision existing even a millennium from now. So I chose steel. Many months later, I was watching a program on the History channel that gave the history of iron. I was surprised to learn steel is 98% iron. Iron has associations with Set, for its meteorites are called ‘the bones of Set’ and a meteor had hit near one of the regions whose people were devoted to Set even as late as Roman times. |
A more frontal view has the light source obscured by the camera, so I had Julia photograph the pendant in the second photo.