Oct 26, 2025
"Those deities, it's the personifications or manifestations of ephemeral things, time and fears, natural phenomena, aspirations, and many other things that come up in human imagination. They're generally non-human agents. They're considered powerful and in absentia, by they can also be present, embodied in actual works of art or in impersonations by people. Artists imagine these deities taking different forms. [...] How do you represent omnipresence or all-seeing deities? [...] the divine could be experienced and made present through sculpture, and the subsequent activation of images in ceremony. So aesthetic choices were thus theological ones. And sculptors navigated this tension between deity and representation of deity."
James Doyle
