While I was working on modeling the faces of the “nymphs” from the Voynich Manuscript for one of my sculptures in progress (inspired by folio 73r), I decided to also work on the beginnings of a second sculpture that I’ve had in mind for some time. This sculpture also features a “Voynich nymph,” but this one is inspired by the particularly unusual imagery on folio 82r:

I am using the same technique that I’ve been developing for my other nymph sculptures: modeling the face in polymer clay, and then making an impression/mold of that to use to make the final sculpture in porcelain with added details.

This nymph in the Voynich Manuscript appears to be... sleeping? Dead? It may be more complicated than that, and many questions have been prompted by this most unusual illustration. In a future post I will explain more of my inspiration behind my sculptural interpretation but for now, I am documenting the beginning stages of the sculpture in this video to show how I model the face from looking at a scaled-up print-out of the manuscript drawing. The final sculpture will have a lot more going on than you will see in this video, since I will incorporate other materials such as glass and metal, and it also will require learning some new techniques to combine these materials to create certain lighting effects that I have in mind. In a later post I’ll discuss some of that process as well as this piece comes together.

Bringing to Life a Sleeping Voynich Nymph?