Sculptured Celebrations

Remember the “Ancient Breast Exam”, a photo my friend Marie took of a sculpture in Stresa, Italy, that I included in a December SharePost? Well, Marie’s been upstaged. Last night, during a gallery walk with a group of Bay City artists, musicians and writers, my friend Carol, just back from Nicaragua, presented me with the above sculpture.

“It’s from San Juan de Limay, a remote village in the mountains of Nicaragua,” she told us after our art tour as we sat around small tables eating pizza. “I had the hardest time finding it. Limay is famous for sculptures hand-carved from what the artisans called 'marmolina,' because the stone resembles marble. Most of the carved female figures were earthy, but I wanted a woman without breasts, as a present for you, to honor your struggle with breast cancer.”

What Carol found was this lovely piece sculpted from volcanic rock with no help from electric tools. She lugged the two pounds of it all the way back, along with ten pounds of Nicaraguan coffee and who knows what else.

I thought it so fitting that this rock had been through fire and survived as this graceful beauty. I like to imagine where the rock had lodged beneath the Nicaraguan mountains, symbolic of what many of us have lost.

I have searched the Internet to try to identify the artist—Carol is already off on another venture and unavailable for details. The closest I can come is a much larger sculpture by Esteylin Ramón Betanco Calderón, a Nicaraguan artist who is well-known throughout Central American and whose work I found on Colorado’s Latino Arts Gallery Web site.

When I Googled for images of breast cancer sculptures on the Web, I didn’t find many that I liked nearly as well as last night’s thoughtful gift. I did discover one though, done by Swedish artist Stina Östberg as part of  “So Many,” a series she created after her diagnosis.