Sculpting Leaves (Or Are They Hands?) By Hand…

A video of my next steps of sculpting the Voynich Manuscript’s f48r imagery in flameworked glass. These pieces, along with the other shape that I previously made, will later be connected together as one piece, and finally filled with a glowing light.

Many of the manuscript’s illustrations look somewhat anthropomorphic to me and this one is no exception. Several even go a step further and include an actual human face in the plant roots. Also, beyond seeming anthropomorphic, some of the “plant” illustrations have features that remind me of other things not necessarily human—sometimes resembling animal features or other inanimate things besides the plants that they appear to be on the surface. One could reasonably interpret the green things on f48r as leaves, but they also remind me of hands with fingers (although some of them have 6 “fingers” rather than 5- and oddly, this follows a consistent pattern: all of the “Single Leaf-Hands” have 5 “fingers,” and all of the “Double Leaf-Hands” have 6, as I’ve noted in the image below. I am not sure what, if anything, this means, but it’s a feature I thought about in this sculpture. It’s the kind of thing one might not notice (or care about, for that matter), unless looking closely at the imagery as a researcher, or in my case as an artist, but I find these odd details to be fascinating). Once the final pieces are assembled, you’ll see how I decided to elaborate on this suggestion of hands, in my own take on this imagery.

This is one of the things that I find so compelling about the Voynich Manuscript imagery—these ambiguous features present a lot of options for the way I could interpret them three-dimensionally and suggest multiple levels of meaning. Since the Voynich images are so ambiguous, I want to keep some ambiguity in my sculptures as well. If I chose just one of the possible meanings and sculpted it in such a way that it excluded all other interpretations, it would not only be less interesting, but would not do justice to the manuscript’s complexity. At the same time, this greatly complicates the task of imagining them in three-dimensional form. For every artistic decision that I make, I could also think of multiple other ways to do it. Scale, context, meaning, symbolism, and more specifications are all unclear in the manuscript, and therefore there are many ways I could choose to approach these in my sculptures, while also needing to consider how to make them structurally sound, what materials to use, and how I want to alter the design to suit my own ideas.

In my work I sometimes invent my own nicknames for parts of the manuscript imagery, since the manuscript is currently unread, and there is no agreed-upon explanation or name for the imagery. For example, I’ve referred to the “Leaf-Hands” here. Or, since I first started making my porcelain versions of the blue-and-white objects on f78r, I’ve called them the “pods”. All the while knowing that no one has agreed that they are in fact meant to represent hands, or pods—and even I do not definitively think this is what they are meant to be—but it is more convenient to call them something short rather than trying to describe them each time.

After a sculpture is complete, I then think about giving it a more “artistic” name, as well, and that can be more loosely related to the manuscript and the variety of ideas surrounding its study.

(Yes, I counted them)

Voynich Manuscript illustration f48r