Tableaux #2 - Higher Learning

TABLEAUX SERIES: (4 in the series)

Tableaux vivant (French for living picture) is a performance art form where people pose silently and motionlessly to recreate a scene, painting, myth, or idea — like a snapshot brought to life.

Tableaux #2: Higher Learning
In Higher Learning, the architecture of knowledge rises to an apex, as does the bookshelf, and the book
entitled 'Hope'.
Hope sits higher now — not out of reach, but clearly elevated, suggesting that with each tableau the quest for meaning becomes more deliberate, more layered, more complex.
Two figures occupy the extremities of this ascent, each embodying a distinct relationship with learning, aspiration, and the inner work of becoming.
On one side, a figure reclines in a gesture of liberation, a surrender to possibility, of learning not as discipline but as expansion.
Opposite her, is an introspective figure. A contemplative, student of the 'self'.
Where her counterpart expresses ease and exuberance, she embodies the rigours of reflection.
Between them, the pyramid of empty shelves becomes a metaphor for the scaffolding of human growth: the things we learn, unlearn, carry, discard, question, and rebuild.
Higher Learning holds the tension between effort and ease, discipline and abandon, introspection and release.

Images in original clay: