Sculpture started for me with making characters, specific characters that I had in mind. My first representations were "Adam" and "Eve". To my surprise I found myself to be involved with that beginning. "Adam" was a tall bouncy young man, and I was to read later that indeed was the way he had been... My "Eve" was small, drawn to earth, I would say attached to it, hardly out of the clay which bears on her and keeps her and keeps her well-rooted. There are no frills to her , only pain and responsibility. Then all kinds of characters followed, all linked to these first 2 archetypes, but also, linked to the earth which was producing them, namely Mesopotamia, where | found myself coming from. Men are tall not because, like Adam, they are tall, but  because man belongs to the human species, standing up, on his two feet. The history of this primeval region came up to me and poured out of my hands, heroes, archetypes, men women of the desert, fedais, refugees, kings and goddesses, wounded waffiors, Gilgamesh and Ishtar, Venus. We have, and are still living in an area where there is a war, it seems, constantly, I thought many times, while working, that if one were to open our tombs, this is what they would find, these witnesses, those who lived our time, fought, died and did not die. I thought of Centaurs, of the Trojan Horse, of all the wounded and the burned, of the bedus and the wanderers. And the earth lent them its eternal fragility. 1 also love the alchemical process by which these characters go through fire. They are fired, twice, baked and then glazed. Sublimated, transformed shapes and forms, they rise, they assert themselves, they stand, pause and look at us, or at the world.

Simone Fattal

Déc. 2000