Opera Omnibus: The Pearl Fishers (May 1985)

For The Pearl Fishers, I created a statue of the four-faced, four-armed god Brahma seated in lotus position. This seat figure was nine feet (2.7 metres) high. It was to appear very old, and carved from sandstone. I therefore made it very massive, and apparently broken in a variety of ways to represent great age (and some neglect, or else poverty among its worshippers).

The statue was huge. I could assemble it only out of doors. I photgraphed it under the pine tree in my front garden. The following photo shows it with, on either side, two stumps of ancient columns also in pinkish sandstone, which I also made, to go with it. They were made from lengths of heavy cardboard tube, wired together and covered in newspaper using wallpaper paste, then painted and textured. To ensure that I could transport the statue using my car (a Citroen BX19 estate with roof rack), I had to make it in three separate pieces: the crossed legs, the torso and the head. The statue had only one pair of legs, which were arranged in a formalized lotus position so that they appeared to be carved in shallow relief from a single massive piece of stone, in the manner of actual seated figure statues of Brahma and the Buddha seen in India, Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia to this day. Note that I say “stylized”; the legs and some aspects of the proportions were deliberately like an ancient sttue, not lifelike.

The torso faced two ways and had four arms. One arm was complete, down to the finger tips; another arm was broken off at the wrist; the third arm was broken off at the elbow; and the fourth arm was just a stump broken off at the shoulder.

The head had four faces, staring (as it were) towards all four points of the compass. The features were rather expressionless, but this is typical of statue of the type, and represents serenity and other-worldliness. One person suggested that the faces were self-portraits; as always (when it is remotely possible to do so), I took this as a compliment, in that it suggested the faces were realistic enough and had at least enough character to look like somebody! 

On the stage during the production, the statue was positioned on a rotating base so that, during successive scenes set in the temple of Brahma, it could be seen from sifferent sides, suggesting that the characters were not always gathered in the identical place during their exchanges. The huge size of the statue can be seen from how it towers above the principals who are downstage of it (nearer the camera) in the photograph.