Why the human head?

A face, before a symbol

A head can hold a room without telling us exactly what to think. We recognise a face before we know its name, then begin to notice its particularities: the set of the mouth, the direction of the gaze, the balance between stillness and movement. Sulala begins with that encounter. These are six people from one family, not interchangeable emblems.

Likeness and memory

A portrait is more than a record of appearance. It can contain the artist’s memory of a person, the time spent making the work, and the distance between the subject’s life and the present. In a family portrait, knowing and remembering become part of the material. A familiar face is never entirely still in the mind.

Scale changes the meeting

Enlarging a head changes our relationship to it. Details normally seen at conversational distance become part of a larger physical presence. We can move around the work and discover that a face which seems composed from one angle appears unsettled from another. Scale gives a private story room to be encountered in public.

Older forms, present lives

The sculptures draw on earlier works without simply repeating them. A Muse helps shape the mother’s portrait; Constantine’s monumental head informs the father’s. Michelangelo’s unfinished forms and Rodin’s expressive modelling offer different ways of approaching vulnerability. The daughter’s portrait returns to an ancient Kore. Each reference is a starting point, transformed through the features of a particular person.

A surface that keeps its history

The surface is not polished into anonymity. Its variations show that a form has been worked, reconsidered, and worked again. In Sulala, recycled PETG is printed at large scale, reworked by hand, and finished with metal coatings and patinas. The resulting surface connects the precision of digital fabrication with the unevenness of touch.

History beside the portrait

Historical film and archival footage widen the setting around each figure. They do not replace the sculpture or explain away its ambiguity. Instead, the still head and the moving image offer different encounters with time: one concentrated in a face, the other unfolding through events and places.

An unfinished inheritance

The family story is not a straight line from hardship to resolution. Care, departure, work, and uncertainty recur in different forms. The daughter’s upward gaze leaves an opening rather than supplying an ending. What has been inherited matters, but it does not exhaust what might come next.

Explore the sculptures

A longer conversation with sculpture

Authority and vulnerability

These portraits can be considered alongside a tradition that includes Egyptian royal heads and the sculpture of the Parthenon. Monumental scale can suggest authority, ideal beauty, or civic belonging. In Sulala, that scale is given to members of a family. The question becomes whose lives deserve a public presence: the people who endured history as well as those who ruled it.

Michelangelo and Rodin: a surface under pressure

Michelangelo’s worked surfaces and Rodin’s expressive heads offer different ways to make an inward state visible. The comparison is not only about likeness. An uneven surface, an unresolved form, or a turn of the head can hold hesitation, effort, and vulnerability. These are particularly important to the grandmother and the self-portrait.

Brancusi and Giacometti: essence and presence

In Sleeping Muse (1910, bronze; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Brancusi reduces the head to fundamental, simplified forms. Giacometti’s Large Head of Diego (1954, bronze; Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung) is wide in profile and very narrow from the front, so its presence changes as the viewer moves. Sulala offers another possibility: forms that retain the identity of particular people while allowing texture and scale to change how we encounter them.

Private memory in public

A family history can become something another person encounters bodily, rather than a story read at a distance. Sulala’s enlarged portraits carry intimate memories into a shared space, without requiring visitors to have lived the same experiences.

Schütte and the question of the monument

Thomas Schütte’s United Enemies series, begun in the early 1990s and prompted in part by the classical portrait busts he saw in Rome, takes up the conventions of commemorative public sculpture in order to unsettle them (United Enemies I, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Petrides gives monumental presence to members of his family, bringing endurance and private memory into public view. This creates a useful tension: a monumental portrait need not celebrate power; it can also make room for uncertainty and ordinary lives.

What the next generation receives

Experiences can reach children and grandchildren through stories, habits, images, and silences. The six portraits let that inheritance remain both personal and open to interpretation. Their public scale gives the quiet work of surviving and caring a visibility usually reserved for grand historical acts.

Works cited

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse, 1910, bronze, object no. 49.70.225. metmuseum.org
Kunsthaus Zürich, Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung. Alberto Giacometti, Large Head of Diego, 1954, bronze, object no. GS 051. giacometti-stiftung.ch
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Schütte, United Enemies I. moma.org