The blazing summer sun and sweltering heat could only add to my giddiness at having the chance to walk amidst the ancient honey-coloured limestone walls of the temples instead of just imagining all this from books.  To see holes in the ground where blood & water was offered to underworld chthonic deities, sacrificial altars shaped like mushrooms, screens and walls turned red by fire and chambers with secret passages where the ancient oracle would have sat and prophesied. To imagine what rituals and mysteries transpired within!

The Sleeping Lady had generous, ample hips and a small head and hands/feet.  As I pondered why, the answer was revealed to me later during the trip, while vacationing with my daughter in Cornwall.  I woke up early one morning to take a stroll, and saw my shadow on the croquet lawn, on a hilltop, at sunrise.  Behold – there was the small head perched on top of a body that loomed large and wide.  I took a picture and measured it: 19 heads instead of the normal human height of 7 ½ heads.  The Goddess at Sunrise? Could these have been the proportions that the Neolithic artist used?  I proceeded to use these GAS proportions anyhow, with slight variations and in my usual neo-classical manner. 

The Goddess figures are hooved; descendants of the First Bovine that exploded to create the universe (cf. Carcass-Cornucopia, 1987).  The head is adorned with snakes.  The hair is gathered at the back in 9 bunches to signify 9 months of gestation and ends with the tail of a scorpion (my astrological sign).  I chose to portray them naked to that I could revel in and fully express the female form with all its soft swellings and undulations. 

The perfect material for fleshing out these voluptuous bodies is clay.  Not the resistant oil-clay or plasticine, but pottery clay, “putik”: earth.  After many pottery workshops I had discovered and indeed wallowed in the sensitivity and lushness of this material.     The rough clay model is then cast into plaster of paris – the material I am most at home with.  At this stage, all the subtler details are worked in by direct modeling, a mix of building up and carving, the technique I’ve always used hand in hand with livecasting.  It proved to be more laborious and painstaking on this minute scale than it was working with life-sized models.  I was also happy to find that years of candle making and carving wax Buddhas now served me well. 

Are these fertility goddesses? Venuses? Mother Goddesses?  All of the above, I guess, but above all, temples in Malta were believed to be sanctuaries for healing where dream incubation was practiced: the worshipper sleeps in a sanctuary in the hope of receiving a cure, or information and knowledge of the divine, through the medium of dreams.  The temples near the burial sites were for ancestral transmutation: a pregnant devotee would sleep in the temple where her ancestors are buried so that the spirits of the dead could enter the fetus and be reborn. 

At the time of writing, work is still in progress.  Work that has been so satisfying and healing. “When you work you fulfill a part of the earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.” – Kahlil Gibran. 

This work is a call for renewing our reverence for Life which comes from our Mother, or Nature, as some would call Her. 

Through this work I have learned to dream again.

Agnes Arellano studied sculpture at University of the Philippines Diliman. A 1988 CCP Thirteen Artists Awardee, and awarded a Freeman Fellowship Residency, 1996, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont, U.S.A. She was also the Founder and President of Pinaglabanan Galleries in San Juan, in memory her late father and the development of contemporary Philippine art. 

She directed the preparation of the bibliography of modern art in the Philippines for the catalogue of “New Art from Southeast Asia 1992”, published by the Japan Foundation.

Designed the stage sculpture, masks and other set pieces in the production of Anton Juan’s play entitled “Death in the Form of a Rose/Kamatayan Sa Hugis Ng Rosas” staged at the Faculty Center Studio, U.P.  (1991).