3 Sirens as a symbol of enchantment, seduction, deadly danger. I worked on this lime wood sculpture intermittently in 2024. The Sirens first appeared in the Odyssey, in which Homer told about the travels across the Mediterranean Sea by the Greek hero Odysseus.
3 Sirens, as a symbol of enchantment and deadly seduction.
Sirens were women who seduced sailors from an island in the Mediterranean Sea with their divine singing. The Greek writer Homer immortalized these deadly dangerous creatures in his ‘Odyssey’.
I looked up the book. In the 1981 translation by Atheneum – Polak & Van Gennep I read on page 528 how the women also wanted to lure Odysseus to the high rocks of their island, standing on their ‘bone field’ of bones and skulls. The hero was, however, warned in advance by the goddess Circe. He therefore proposed a plan to the crew of his ship. ‘Tie me upright to the mast in tight ropes, so that I cannot move’, Odysseus would have commanded according to Homer.
So they approached first sailing and then rowing the island of the two Sirens. Odysseus cut pieces of wax with a sword and kneaded the pieces until they became soft. One by one he put the wax in his ‘companions” ears, so they would hear nothing anymore. In turn they tied their captain firmly to the mast.
‘Listen to our song’
As soon as they were within earshot, the women began their singing: ‘Come here, unrivaled Odysseus, most famous hero of the Greeks! Moor with your ship and listen to our song’. Odysseus immediately forgot all warnings and tried with his eyebrows to get the crew to release him. But the men rowed stubbornly on, past the island.
The story resonates to this day, even though the Sirens completely changed form over the centuries. In paintings such as those by John William Waterhouse from 1891 they got wings as if they were angels. Later they even got a fish tail. The mermaid was born, still alluring, but no longer because they sang so beautifully. One of the most beautiful modern adoptions of Homer’s epic poem is that of the Coen brothers Joel and Ethan in their film ‘Brother, Where art thou’.
3 Sirens by the Coen brothers, washing and singing in the river.
The Sirens are in this brilliant ‘road movie’ no longer just two, but stand as three in the river, singing while scrubbing the laundry. ‘Go to sleep, you little baby’, they sing. And yes, George Clooney and his ‘Soggy Bottom Boys’ fall for it.
Homer gave no description of the appearance of these mythical creatures in his story. That is why I too felt free to give my own interpretation. As a starting point I took a beautiful cover illustration by Olivia Ettema for P+ (the medium about sustainable developments) about human ecosystems. Olivia depicted this theme as a circle of intertwined figures. I picked two women on sassy boots from there. Seductive enough, those ladies, but not so much as to get disapproving reactions from Woke circles like: ‘Not OK!’.
Ready to take off
My two sirens of lime wood also got abstract Picasso-like hands, with which they hold up a third Siren. Only this one I gave angel wings, as if she is ready to take off, on her way to unsuspecting victims.
The Sirens are carved in three-quarter relief, so that flat surfaces remained to place them on a background. That became a ‘sun disc’ of mahogany, turned for me from the broken arch of a bar by Hans van Wijk. Finishing of the sun disc with 24-carat gold leaf. A spotlight on it, so that the Sirens seem to circle around a lamp like insects. I treated the top Siren with a gas burner. I sanded off most of the charred top layer, but not everywhere. Badly burned pieces like in her long ponytail I repaired with two-component putty gilded with gold.
Domain name Dendroism.com registered
It became a project I worked on for a year in 2024, with considerable interruptions. I wanted to try to bring more dynamics into my wood carving. Wooden sculptures so often remain clumsy and massive, so close still to their original piece of tree trunk. That goal has been reasonably achieved, although I have also come to the conclusion that more abstracted sculptures remain fascinating to look at longer than too precisely executed figurative representations.
I also want to put the stories that the wood itself already tells much more in the foreground. At the end of this year 2024 I therefore arrived at a new term to indicate this direction: dendroism. ‘Dendron’ is the ancient Greek word for ‘tree’.
The domain name has already been registered: dendroism.com, with pages on Facebook and Instagram under the same name. In 2025 I will fill in this story with old and especially with lots of new work.
Jan Bom
January 19, 2025
