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It came to me in a dream...

The creative spark of the Nebra Disk series came to me in a dream. The dream made no sense to me. I just woke up with an image of the Pleiades star constellation vibrating in my awakening mind.

I pay attention to vibrating dreams.

Within a couple of weeks, I had validation that I would sculpt something around the Pleiades star constellation. From a random book at the bookstore, I discovered the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades appeared on a very early bronze plate called the Nebra Sky Disk, created around 1600 BCE:

This idea manifested itself physically in my art through two pieces: the 3 Nebra Sky Disks and the Nebra Sky Disk and Swords.

Nebra Sky Swords (click on image for story)

Nebra Sky Disks 3

Getting Unstuck

I wanted to complete three pieces in the Nebra Sky Disk series, but the third piece eluded me, and I hadn’t sculpted for months and months. After finishing Breakthrough (the Trojan horse), I secretly was afraid to move forward to the next project. Could I achieve the same level of satisfaction and success as I did with Breakthrough? How would I ever finish the third of the Nebra Series?

I was stuck.

Years ago, I read a book by Elizabeth Gilbert titled Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. In it, she makes an unusual premise about ideas.

"Our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas… They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us… Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest… Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners."

She goes on to say that if a human partner takes too long to manifest an idea in the world, that idea will move to another, more available partner. 

Have you ever possessed a cool idea that you never did anything about only sometime later to come across YOUR IDEA that someone else took and made real? “Hey…that’s MY idea!”

I wondered after a delay of months and months, would the final sculpture of the Nebra Series, namely--the Nebra Sky Sisters--elude me and move to someone else? I’m not driven by fear, but I felt I might miss this opportunity.

And The Women Came…

Fussing and wondering about this third piece, I read another book by the same author—Elizabeth Gilbert—titled The Signature of All Things. 

The heroine, Alma, lived in the mid-late 1800s as a botanist. She traveled to Tahiti to study the flora and stayed in a missionary camp among the native Tahitians, forming close friendships over time. 

During a festival, she was on the sidelines of an athletic event that looked a lot like rugby, played by women on a field that included the beach and ocean. 

There were very few rules. 

She was yanked into this event and found her “best” friend sitting on top of her in five feet of water. Drowning and considering death, "She relaxed even more. She saw a pale light. She felt invited toward something lovely. She felt summoned… Then—in the seconds that remained before it would have been too late to reverse course at all—Alma suddenly knew something… she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died… It was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest."

Alma arose out of the water, furious, yelling into the face of her attacker and ready to live her life. 

I shot up in bed, overwhelmed by the power of this simple observation, and cried hard. 

Leaving my bed to discover a beautiful full moon. The gentle, powerful, and female energy of the moonlight was my gift. The ladies had come in, and I was ready to sculpt.

Enter 7 Sisters and Their Story in the Sky

The Pleiades star formation is in the constellation of Taurus. They are visible with the naked eye and set low enough in the sky to appear in both hemispheres. 

For many ancient cultures, the sisters' reign in the sky (May to September in the Northern Hemisphere and from October to April in the Southern Hemisphere) coincided with the start and end of the farming and seafaring seasons.

The Greeks identified the seven sisters as the daughters of Atlas and Pleione. These fair nymphs caught the attention of nearby Orion and were pursued by him for years (or perhaps eons). A protective Zeus intervened and turned them into doves, casting them into the sky and immortalizing them as the Seven Sisters: Sterope, Merope, Electra, Maia, Taygete, Calaeno, and Alcyone.

The Dance of the Nymphs by Edouard Bisson

For the third sculpture in the Nebra series, I interpret the Greek stories around the individual sisters and will sculpt a simple figure for each. I reserve some artistic license to account for the variation in the Greek descriptions of each sister. The Nebra Sky Disk will serve as the platform for the seven sisters as they will be attached to it and oriented in the “shape” of the star constellation.

An early mock-up of the Nebra Sky Sisters in the palm of my hand:

The realized clay version, ready for molding, and then off to the foundry:

I’m excited to manifest this idea of the Nebra Sky Sisters. They taught me the creative spark and process can vary depending on the sculpture. 

Sometimes it is a playful process, just getting into the studio and exploring. Sometimes it is a cerebral process involving research,  calculation, and lots of measuring. And sometimes it is a dream process, dropping an idea in the mind. 

Across each different creative process and source, trust is required.

This sculpture is dedicated to my own sister--Kim Ramsey Meyer.