Vintage dressed girl with ice riding horse. (2018) Original Clay Sculpture by Elya Yalonetski

This sculpture comes from a project that is particularly close to my heart, "Le Carousel, Hommage à l'Innocence", which I first presented at the Art Dolls fair in Prague in 2018, and which has since lived carefully in its wooden box, surviving the long quiet of the corona years to find its way out now, offered exclusively to my Artfinder followers before it goes anywhere else. The whole project, which can be seen on my Facebook artist page, is a love letter to the innocence and joy of children who have spent the entire year waiting, with that particular concentrated patience only children possess, for the lights of the Christmas market to come on once again, for the music of the carousel to start, and for the painted horses to begin their slow circular journey through the cold winter air.
Here, on a horse the color of warm caramel and gold, sits one of those children, perched a little proudly, a little dreamily, holding a small ice cream cone in her hand as though nothing in the world could be more precious in this exact moment. She is dressed in her finest, a soft lilac jacket with rows of tiny buttons running down the front, a layered white ruff at the throat in the manner of a small Renaissance prince or princess, full breeches in mossy green, and a wide cream-colored hat speckled with green and finished with a small medallion at the side, the kind of hat that announces the wearer has dressed up for the occasion. Her chestnut curls fall in carefully sculpted spirals around a pale face with rounded cheeks and turquoise eyes that are focused entirely on the cone in her hand, that particular gaze of total, uncomplicated attention that we lose somewhere along the way and spend the rest of our lives trying to remember.
The horse beneath her is the real magic of the carousel, golden-bodied and bright-eyed, with a flowing dark mane, a small flourish at the top of his head where the carousel pole would rise, and a great geometric medallion painted on his flank in red, green, and cream like a little stained-glass window made of leather. His turquoise eye, lined and lashed with the same care I gave to his rider, looks ahead with cheerful determination, as though he knows exactly how many turns he still owes the children of the world before the night is over. There is a small painted rose at his hoof, a final tender detail from a maker who could not bear to leave any surface plain.
Together they hold a moment that does not really exist in clock time, the moment just before the carousel begins to move, when the husic has already started but the horses have not yet lifted, when the child has just received her ice cream and the whole long-awaited evening is still entirely ahead of her, untouched and perfect.
There is something I want to say about the collectible value of pieces from this particular period of my work, because it matters more now than it did when I first made them. The years that followed 2018 were not kind to the world I had been sculpting from, the pandemic split societies I had once trusted, and wars came afterwards in every country I had lived in across my life before moving to Berlin, one after another, taking with them the kind of openhearted lightness that this carousel project was made out of. My work since then has changed. It has had to. The figures I make now carry more weight in their shoulders, more knowing in their eyes, more silence in the room around them. The childlike touch that breathes through this little horse and her rider, that particular unguarded sweetness, is not something I can return to in the same way, because the artist who could make it without irony or sorrow no longer exists in quite the same form. That is simply what time and history do to a person who works with their hands. It also means that the pieces from "Le Carousel, Hommage à l'Innocence" have become, quietly and without my planning it, a closed chapter, a small finite series from a particular window of innocence in my own life as much as in the lives of the children I was honoring. There will not be more of them. The ones that exist are the ones that will ever exist.
This is a one-of-a-kind, fully handmade ceramic sculpture from the original 2018 series, in excellent condition, having been kept safely in its wooden box for years. It is offered now to my Artfinder collectors as a small piece of preserved innocence, a hommage to the children we were and to the children who are still, somewhere, waiting for the lights of the market to come on.
If you would like to see the rest of the carousel and meet the other riders in this project, you are warmly invited to follow me on Facebook, where the whole series is documented.
Have a beautiful day, and thank you for stopping in front of this small horse for a moment.

Materials used:

clay, engobe, glaze

Details:

• Clay sculpture on Other
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 18 x 26 x 8cm
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the back
• Style: Expressive and gestural
• Subject: Animals and birds

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