Page 63 - Studio International - June 1966

Mirror Maze 1966
Bronze, copper and perspex
14 3/4 x 24 x 18 1/2 in.

The maze maker 1966 different, for each is personal and yet various. Each is a
prison and a sanctuary, a journey and a destination. The
belly contains its entrail maze and the skull encloses the
brain's baffling convolutions, but the maze each human
Since 1964, most of my work has been concerned with the being makes is more than those, for it contains him wholly
image of a man in a labyrinth. My point of departure remains, and he extends it all his life. Furthermore, each maze is an
as it has for ten years past, an aspect of the Daedalus instrument upon which a man plays such music as his life
legend, but where my concern between 1959 and 1962 was creates. That is why in certain bronzes I have strung the
with the celebrated flight from Knossos and the fall and labyrinth like a lyre and the strings wind out from the
death of Icarus and, between 1962 and 1964, with the Mino- maker's guts and nerves to supplant the navel cord.
taur, the Cumaean Sybil and to a lesser extent with Talos, To the spectator, another man's maze does not look im-
the bronze guardian of Crete — secondary, but to me impor- penetrably intricated. It may resemble a box of reflections,
tant, participants in the same myth—I have, during the last or a cage with invisible bars, or a pierced shield like a trophy
two years, found Daedalus himself dominant. I have found hung with incongruous ornament, or a head filled with ap-
him so powerful that I have struggled to free myself from parently disconnected elements, but to the maze-maker
him even to the extent of writing his 'life', a narrative, pro- himself his maze is an all-absorbing thing compounded of
visionally entitled The Maze Maker, and it is in Daedalus as confusion, achievement, frustration, and reverence, which
maze-maker that my recent work has its source. continually grows in complexity. Totem, toy, trial, and tor-
Paradoxically, by entering his labyrinth I have partially ment, it is seldom mapped for others; its geometry is ambi-
succeeded in exorcizing him, for the figure of the Maze guous, its material, dense and solid at one moment, is
Maker is no longer specifically Daedalus, although the illusory and transparent in the next so that its topology is
labyrinth he built at Knossos, wherein he was imprisoned obscure.
with his son and which also served to hide and confine the As for my own maze, Daedalus made me aware of it but
Minotaur, gave the initial impulse to the image. Like all great now leaves me in it. My landscapes seem to be marked with
myths, the parts grow independently and take on their own his footprints and to continue to contain the Minotaur,
vitality. Thus the Maze has come to serve for me as an image crouched out of sight, and the Oracle speaking from inside
of my own life and indeed of any individual's life. Every man, the rock. To these Demeter and her daughter have been
it seems to me, makes his maze out of his experiences, his added, making and unmaking the seasons. They and their
circumstances, his hopes and fears, and in it he lives, so landscape are the subject of my other work since 1964.
that the shape of it identifies him. Every maze is therefore Michael Ayrton