No object has had a longer history in the art of the world than the human skull. The treated or decorated skull appears in the art of Oceania and Africa and most gloriously in the sky-coloured turquoise-covered crania of Pre-Columbian America.

It is now quite difficult to acquire a skull other than one's own. The particular example on which these works are based was bought from an ethnographic dealer and is a fetish skull from the Southern Seas.

All were adaptations of a cast of this, worked on and re-cast in bronze or glass (via wax) or directly created in collage or other techniques of application. Collage elements include the ever-serviceable repertoire of A Human Document, The Boys Own Paper, colour supplements of newspapers or, more recently, prostitutes' advertising cards.

A work in (slow) progress features two casts of the skull covered in my own hair. Now at the transition stage on the way to the bus-pass years my pepper and salt hair represents all phases of my life past and (D.V.) future: the dark brown of youth can still be collected from my head whereas my beard yields almost pure white. The first of two projected works is shown in its present form; awaiting further growth. It represents the old artist meeting his younger self coming the other way, a sort of Bonjour, Monsieur Tom.

Luckily, George's in the Peckham Road, whom I have been going to since my student days, knows me well enough no to find too sinister the request for my own hair-sweepings to be bagged up.

Drawing to a Conclusion (1997),  p. 6.

More Treated Skulls, 68 Kb

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