Work: Woman in the wind

Description

“Personally, I prefer marble, absolutely. It is a material that means commitment, effort, sweat. You have to set to, with your whole body and work”, Felice Tagliaferri.

Woman in the Wind is a marble sculpture, about 32cm high, of the head and neck of a young woman with her hair blown back by a gust of wind. It was carved by Felice Tagliaferri, a blind sculptor, in 2005.

The young woman’s face has fine, small, regular features, although her nose bends slightly to her right. Her eyes, without iris or pupil but with perceptible lids, are open and also turned to her right. Her closed lips appear slightly arched in an almost imperceptible smile.
Her face is surrounded by her thick hair, piled high above her forehead and voluminous beside her cheeks. Its appearance of being swept horizontally backwards conveys the idea of a strong gust of wind blowing in the young woman’s face. Grooves of various widths and depths outline the locks of her long straight hair.
The identity of the woman is not known, but the sculpture is part of a series of figures in the wind, a theme to which the artist often returns.

Caressing the marble, you will come across diverse surface textures: rougher at the hair, smoother over the skin while the part below the neck has deliberately been left unfinished.

Tagliaferri, who lost his sight at the age of 14, became a sculptor thanks to a workshop held by Nicola Zamboni. His sculpture is mainly figurative and his creativity and manual ability has been expressed in a variety of materials ranging from clay to marble. He founded “La Chiesa dell’Arte”, a school of the plastic arts, where he holds sculpture courses and workshops for the sighted and the blind.