Meditation with a bird (2022) Original Clay Sculpture by Elya Yalonetski

A study of natural harmony: she sits quietly on the edge of the world, one knee drawn up, the other folded under her, perfectly at ease in her own body. A small bird has come to rest on her raised hand, painted in soft greens and roses, its tiny weight no more than a thought. She is not holding the bird, it's the bird that has chosen her. They are looking at each other in the way that only happens when nothing else is in a hurry.
This is a piece about the kind of balance you cannot pose for, the moment when a person and a wild thing share a breath of stillness without fear on either side, which is something you can only receive once you have become quiet enough to be approached.
I sculpted her in deep, warm earth tones the color of riverbed clay and late afternoon light, her skin glowing in soft caramel and bronze, with darker shadows pooling at her ribs and along the curve of her thigh, while the contrast comes from above, in the magnificent turban that crowns her, a swirl of green, rose, copper, and cream glazed in glossy painterly strokes like a small private sunset wrapped around her head. Around her neck she wears a band of patterned beadwork, on her wrist a stack of bracelets in the same colors as her turban, as if she had gathered fragments of the bird's plumage and woven them into her own adornments. Her eyes are pale green, lined with great care, looking sideways at her tiny visitor with the half-smile of someone who has been waiting and is pleased to be found.
The skin of this sculpture is finished with a special traditional technique: after the first firing, the ceramic is bathed in milk and fired once again at around 400 degrees Celsius, so that the milk burns into the surface and leaves behind those soft russet shadows and that warm, organic patina that no glaze alone can produce. Each piece treated this way emerges a little differently, because the fire decides; it is one of the oldest finishing methods in pottery, and it gives the figure a quality both ancient and alive, closer to wood or to skin than to ceramic.
She is small enough to hold in two hands and large enough to change the room she enters, and wherever you choose to place her, on a windowsill, a writing desk, or a quiet shelf, the small bird on her hand will go on keeping watch, patient and unafraid, as though the moment between them were never going to end.

Materials used:

clay, engobe, glaze

Details:

• Clay sculpture on Other
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 10 x 16 x 14cm
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the back
• Style: Expressive and gestural
• Subject: Animals and birds