The concept for Janus of Love was created by Ms Silvia Schwarzer. I am grateful to her for the idea at the heart of this work. As a sculptor, I have given it form through two faces: one looking down in reflection, the other looking up and forward.
Love can end, leaving us with loss, disappointment and questions. I wanted the downward-looking face to acknowledge that state without treating reflection as weakness.
I think of our response to disappointment as a kind of metabolising: we live with an experience and gradually transform what it means within us. What happened remains part of our lives, but our relationship to it can change.
The sculpture begins with Thalia, a head modelled on my mother. I have doubled her face, placing two versions back to back. Their different expressions belong to one continuous form. The hopeful face remains physically joined to the reflective one.
For me, optimism is the willingness to remain open to love when experience has given us reasons to close ourselves off. The upward-looking face holds that possibility: the courage to trust, to feel and to love again.
As we walk around Janus of Love, one face comes into view and the other recedes. We cannot see the whole work from a single position. I hope that encounter offers recognition and leaves room for the possibility that the heart can open again.