La Bouche

La Bouche returns the mouth to sculpture as pure opening. There is no face here and no lips to read: curved sheets of bronze fold in on themselves around a central void, and the eye is drawn to the space they enclose rather than to any of the metal that makes it. The surfaces are deliberately unequal. Some are burnished until they hold the light like the inside of a shell; others keep the pitted, granular skin of the cast, and the edges are left torn rather than trimmed. That contrast is where the work does its arguing — one face of the same sheet invites the hand, the other warns it off. Roger builds his forms by hand before they are committed to metal, and the bronze keeps the record of that handling: the pull, the fold, the place where a sheet has split as it was pushed. At 18 by 22 by 19 inches the piece asks to be circled, each turn closing or opening the cavity at its centre. Cast in an edition of four; this is number one.