Sauron

This piece, made in Freiburg, is inspired by one of the coolest courses ever, hands down! The red-orange central glass bead was the first that I made in a glass studio in Murano, Italy.

 

Heroes have changed through time, and thisbroochdepicts some of the great heroes, from Beowulf to Lisbeth Salander.

Over time, heroes move further and further from their gods. Initially they seem to be one and the same. Thor is both hero and god. In the Iliad and the Odyssey humans are at the mercy of the gods, but there is hope for changing their minds.

Likewise, attitudes toward battle and adventure change in response to the events experiences by the authors of heroes.

Beowulf willingly goes into battle to kill the dragon. Odysseus tries to get out of having to go to Troy, but then acts heroically and compares notes with other heroes in Hades about who died a better death. Before WWI, people studied the Iliad and then were ready to march off to a war to repeat that brand of bloody heroism. It turned out that the gods were very far away indeed. Tolkien survived WWI to write The Hobbit. His protagonists, Bilbo, is extremely reluctant to embark on some senseless “heroic” mission but finds he must enter (a second) world war in order to stop Sauron (Hitler). These reluctant heroes are more likely to hide than to fight. Later, in Brave New WorldWinston Smith is a cog in a system that has wiped out individualism and heroism. The frightful question is, will any hero have any spark left after the system has suppressed it? Now fast-forward to a time of insidious digital totalitarianism. Intellectual independence and ability to code are required to challenge and flip these new constraints. And then there is Lisbeth Salander the hacker and Harry Potter, the whistleblower hero. Whistle-blowing can be necessary for the battles we now think we are fighting.

 

The eye of Sauron, with a central eye in blacks and spiky orange, gazes out from a fiery firmament, ready to laze away the day, or to mesmerize and strike.

 

Among all these stories, the position of women is always peripherally central. Heroes are usually men, but very human concerns are often the sharpest spur for conflict. Heroes and villains plunge forward on a treadmill that seems to have little to do with politics and grand greater cultural good, but does relate to the root of heroism.