At first, I simply wanted to move toward representing the human figure and step away from the abstraction I had been immersed in in previous projects.

Modeling faces was what came first. They are not portraits, just faces emerging from my hands, rising out of nothingness. My idea was to make them “come out of the earth,” but quite quickly the opposite happened—as if the earth were swallowing them.

I started from something joyful, like a birth, where faces—and perhaps bodies—would emerge from the soil. But in the end, something rather morbid came out of it: faces being devoured by the earth, an unintended metaphor for death, burial, our fragile condition as mortals, our inevitable return to the ground. Thus, contrary to the original intention, what emerged was a rather dramatic, dark, and macabre series: like frightened, frightening faces, saying no, refusing to be swallowed, yet unable to resist being engulfed—unable to resist the anxiety of disappearance.

What do these faces tell us about the Other within ourselves?