SEA SHELL ARCH

                                                                                   by

                                                                       Frank La Rosa

                                                              

   I've taken as the model or image for my my clay sculpture a small remnant of a seashell. That piece of shell must have broken off the main shell many years ago, and the sea tumbled and polished it for who knows how long--hundreds even thousands of years--rolled and caressed by the waves until one day it was cast up on the beach,  I saw it and picked it up. 

   This tiny remnant is the opening to the shell where the mollusk or sea creature goes out and comes back into its home. This passageway is long and spiral-ribbed like the rest of the shell, but it is polished like smooth porcelain.  The opening forms a kind of elongated arch  that leads out from inner security, a home, to the outer world of the sea which is the creature's outer home. All of our lives exist in and through arches.

   This creature's body is composed  mostly of water and some minerals, but in spite of this its somewhat amorphous, flaccid body has the intelligence to have created a very hard protective shell, a doorway, and even a door. This sea creature, like its fresh water cousins, created a smooth entryway, shiny and slippery, and of the right proportions for egress and reentry. It has also made its own hinged door called an operculum, a fitted lid that the soft bodied mollusk can open and close as it feels fit and that is appropriate to all occasions; to keep itself safely enclosed and keep out dangers of all kinds, except possibly that of mankind. The operculum is a finely made valve, if you think about it that way,  that the creature both shuts out and keeps closed securing it being. It can "Then- close the Valves of her attention- /Like Stone", to quote Emily Dickinson.

The soul selects its own society,  Emily Dickinson