The Oppressor. A sculpture about oppression.
Hammer, nails, wood. 18x34x26cm. May 2023.
This sculpture is a work of political art, as it is partly a metaphor for oppression and rebellion.
The work shows a hammer empaled by nails.
Part of the concept behind the sculpture is that the hammer is being impaled by the objects that it normally hits – the nails. The hammer is a symbol of oppression and the nails are symbols of the oppressed.
But the sculpture poses the question – how did the nails manage to impale the hammer? Nails by their nature need a hammer, or a stand-in for a hammer, in order to be effective and to fulfil their purpose. Were the nails hammered into the hammer by another hammer? In that case the nails are not a metaphor for the oppressed rising up against their oppressor (the hammer) using their own power, but are more like the followers of another power (another hammer?) that may turn out to be as oppressive as the hammer that they’ve empaled.
This sculpture is a development of an idea that I had in 2010 when it started life as a drawing of a hammer with three nails in it.
Since then it developed into a 3D sculptural work composed of a hammer nailed directly onto a flat surface as though pinned down.
This further version has the hammer suspended above the surface and with many more nails driven into it so that it’s starting to resemble a nail fetish figure.
