If human expressions tell emotions, so do the bodies. Our malleable bodies are God’s creative artworks unfolding various kinds of inner activities. Just like the languages we use that are signs of implicit meanings, different shapes of bodies are linguistic symbols for expressing personal emotions.
Duncan creates a series of sculptures that reflect this feature, highlighting what comes to be the most appealing dimension of our bodies, namely, bodies as expository linguistic signs.
Consequently, every part of our bodies is simplified and symbolized into signs of sorts. The head is simplified into a dot, limbs are transformed into curls of lines. Accordingly, for keeping the flow of signs, the main body is perceived as a whole. This recreation seems to encumber the expression of human emotions since all details accounting for emotional expressions become depersonalized signs like codified words entail interpretations.
However, rather than hindered by the course of codification, Duncan’s unique body signs convey her understanding of human emotions. Despite the complication of variable signs, her designs resonate with a sense of serenity that can only be found in the garden of Eden. It is an ideal human state established at the beginning of its creation but, devastatingly, undermined gradually by the corruptions of civilizations.
Hence, rather than feeling the tension of life that haunts us daily, we are eased by the look of those symbolic figures, which, somehow, deliver a wave of relaxation, like the gentle breeze ripples the backwater of hearts.
