The Macabre Bleeds into the Sensual

as

The Truth Sits Under the Lie

(peg leVine, 2010)

Peg’s images have been described as ‘an elegant excursion into the abyss’. Figurative works often stack metal, stone and ceramic like sacred cairns. Some sculptures are cast to spin round for her stage performances of first-person genocide accounts. Most works hold the delicate tension between the grotesque and the sensual. 

Peg’s professional experiences as a torture-responsive psychologist, medical anthropologist, and scholar of mass violence and scorched-earth wars give voice to the subjects of her work.

It is as if my imagination gets saturated by the ways humans invent, perpetrate and justify cruelty. My body is restless until I sculpt or write on the realities few dare to contemplate for very long.” When exhibiting her work, Peg takes her duty of care seriously; she will not shock her audience with torture details, or foster any “ism” narrative (nationalism, monotheism, heterosexism, etc). Cruelty is cruelty — regardless of which side of the fence you’re on.

Peg’s Brief History of Sculpting 

Beginning as a raku potter while holding to classic firing methods, Peg evolved into a figurative ceramic sculptor (1989-1999) across Virginia, Seattle, and Miyazaki to Kyoto, Japan. Raku’s blackened method of firing was an easy transition for casting in bronze. There’s something about the unpredictability and intensity of wax, molten metal, and fire. Appreciating the classics, she maintains traditional methods while using hand tools in her relationships with alabaster and limestone.

Peg gathered her confidence as a bronze sculptor during the casting course at the University of Tasmania (2008). She took quickly to alabaster during her studio carving mentorship in Culver City, Los Angeles (2017). Soon, she discovered fossilised creatures embedded in the Omaru limestone of New Zealand (2018) and learned to respectfully carve around them.

As for me, Peg says, the macabre bleeds into the sensual, just as clay and bronze bodies are tinged by fire. Raku firing offers predictable-unpredictability — some make it through fire and some don’t. Yet, clay bodies that survive are rendered more vulnerable through their porous transition. When tapped, raku-fired clay sounds flat while blackened hues get tinged in turquoise, which are breathtaking. 

Select Published and Exhibited Works

Some Books by Peg LeVine, PhD, EdD

Classic Morita Therapy: Consciousness, Justice and Trauma (Routledge Press, 2018) [moritatherapy.net]; sculptural plates support case studies published in Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm Under the Khmer Rouge (University of Chicago Press, 2010). [Through her 7-year film ethnographic research in SE Asia, Peg coined the term Ritualcide in the genocide literature (see Wikipedia); she gave exert witness at the ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Cambodia).  Her sculptures depict traditions and protective spirit agents — as captured in her alabaster ‘Garuda’.

Some Exhibitions

Peg sculptures have been exhibited in Chicago (Art in Response to Violence Inaugural Keynote); Phnom Penh (The Goethe Institute); Laos (Child Landmine victims (Handicap International project under Dr Didier Bertrand) where the millions of UXOs may never be cleared; Melbourne (Monash Asia Institute); Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

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Sculpt Off Cruelty Project: (Page Under Construction) This is a ProBono (no-religious affiliation) project started by Peg in response to services for refugees that fall short of restorative practices that respond to psychological torture with and without physical torture, and fall short of accounting for 3/4 of the world steeped in animist perceptions and practices (regardless of language, religion, etc.).