Tara Krause :: Woman Soar

Tara Krause Visual Artist

Woman Soar: Porcelain on Steel (2007)

	On Friday October 26th at dusk, I was walking up the grand boulevard of Arlington National Cemetery toward the Women's Memorial. It was pouring rain and I was carrying the maquette in my hands delicately lest I break it, having hand carried it across the continent. I thought of my great uncle, MG Keller Rockey (US Marines), buried here. And how he treasured Felix De Weldon's maquette of the Flag Raising. It felt as I was bringing a humble offering to the altar of Athena, Woman Soar: Porcelain on Steel. When Susan Feland and Jackie Stennette asked me to create a sculpture for our fallen women of AcademyWomen.org, I knew I wanted to integrate the three decades of women academy graduates, our circle interwoven of sister warriors. I meditated on and contemplated the blazing essense of 4 of our fallen: Jennifer Harris, USNA 2000 Megan McClung, USNA 1995 Emily Jazmin Tatum Perez, USMA 2005 Laura Walker, USMA 2003
	I wanted to work with the metaphor of the monarch butterfly, which the Aztec people held as the incarnate souls of fallen warriors. Last fall when I was painting murals in the Long Beach VA hospital, we watched the emergence of a monarch from its jeweled jade chrysalis. And finally, I wanted to work with porcelain. Ki Cho, a master ceramicist at Echo Ceramics in LA, was my avatar of how delicate we could extrude porcelain such that it could survive the fire of the kiln. Each maquette is hand draped. It took basically 20 to 1 in this experimental process. And in a nod to our granite highland origin, the base was a warm Italian granite.


Back