The concept
The concept for Janus of Love was created by Silvia Schwarzer. I am grateful to her for the idea at the heart of this work. My task as a sculptor has been to give it a physical and emotional life: to make the movement from the loss of love to the renewal of love visible in a single form, and to give that movement the face of a specific person, not a type.
What love leaves
Love can end. Sometimes it ends in a single day; more often it ends slowly, and we understand only afterwards what has gone. What it leaves behind is not empty. There is loss, and disappointment, and the questions we ask ourselves: what happened, what we might have done differently, whether we were foolish to have trusted.
These questions turn us inward. I wanted to give that inward-looking state a face, and I did not want to treat it as weakness or as something to be hurried through. The downward-looking face of this sculpture is not defeated. She is remembering, and she is thinking. Reflection is part of loving; it is what love asks of us when it is over.
Metabolising
I think of what happens next as a kind of metabolising. We take in an experience that may be painful or hard to understand, live with it, and gradually transform what it means within us. The love itself does not change; it happened, and it remains part of who we are. Our relationship to it can change.
This is different from forgetting. It does not require us to pretend that the loss was necessary, or that it was a gift, and it has nothing to do with forced cheerfulness. What interests me is our capacity to make something further from what has happened: a clearer knowledge of what we need, a more generous way of holding another person, and the courage to open the heart again to someone new. The raw material is the disappointment itself. Nothing is thrown away.
Two faces of one life
The sculpture begins with Thalia, a head modelled on my mother. I have doubled that face, placing two versions back to back. One looks down, absorbed in memory. The other lifts her gaze and looks forward. They belong to the same form, just as grief and hope can belong to the same person at the same moment.
The forward-looking face has not escaped her past. The two remain joined at the back of the head, and no view of the sculpture shows one without some trace of the other. This matters to me: loving again does not require us to become someone else, or to pretend the first love did not happen. We carry it with us, and we open the heart anyway.
I made this work for International Women’s Day. For me, the connection is the courage to remain open after being refused; the sculpture gives that courage the face of a woman who lived it.
Optimism as an openness
The optimism I want to express is neither certainty nor a promise of happiness. It is the willingness to remain open to love when experience has given us reasons to close ourselves off. To trust again is not naïve; it is the harder thing, done with full knowledge of what trust can cost. The upward-looking face holds that possibility. She is not waiting to be rescued. She is choosing to look.
“Love” in the title means romantic love first, but not only. It includes love for a child, for a friend, for the people we choose, and the feeling that lets us engage with the world again after it has hurt us. The future cannot be guaranteed. It can still be met with feeling, curiosity and generosity.
A form to walk around
Janus of Love cannot be fully seen from one position. As we move around it, one face comes into view and the other recedes. The sculpture asks for the same movement of attention that love asks of us: looking back, looking inward, then looking forward.
I do not want the work to prescribe how anyone should recover from the loss of love, or how long that should take. I hope it offers recognition, and leaves room for the possibility that the heart can open again.
George Petrides