Mesa Moonrise

by Star Liana York

Size: 7H x 6W x 6D
Medium: Bronze

One of Star's earlier sculptures, titled "Captured Bride", depicted a warrior standing over a woman he had stolen from another tribe. But the scene is hardly a triumphant one. The Woman is huddled in a blanket at the Brave's feet, looking unhappily towards the hills of home, while he gazes down at her with a troubled expression - as though he is beginning to realize that abducting this woman was the easy part, and now they must begin a life together.
The edition is sold out, but Star kept the wax of the woman on her desk thinking someday she might use it for another piece. From time to time, looking at the woman, she found herself wondering what a woman taken away from home, against her will, as she was coming of age and forced to be a stranger's bride would eventually come to feel. The woman's forlorn expression bothered Star; her situation seemed so unresolved. Out of context of the original image she seemed incomplete. Somehow, Star wanted the woman's story to end on a more satisfied note. For these reasons, she felt it deserved to be a piece in itself.
The basic composition of "Mesa Moonrise" remains the same. The woman's position has not changed, but her expression has and that makes all the difference. She still has a faraway look, but the lines of her face have softened and shifted. Her lips curve into a quiet smile, which says she has made a home for herself; she is where she feels she belongs now; she has found a certain satisfaction in her life.
In the scene Star imagined, the woman is sitting on a ridge and gazing across a long stretch of evening as a full moon - swollen yellow in the rarefied desert air - floats up from the far side of a mesa. She is wrapped for warmth now; and she has found a private peace. In the huge, luminous, perfectly round moon - whose global shape her own position simulates - she sees reflected her own glowing fullness.