“This piece is part of the Historic Jar Collection and recalls Manet’s painting of the same name. While Manet sought to confront the viewer with Olympia’s gaze, as she was a known sex worker, Hodge’s reinvention of the scene focuses on the connection between the two women in the scene. Instead of Olympia looking out for her next client, she is captured by this woman’s gesture of affection in the form of a bouquet.”
Olympia, 2019 Sculpture
Olympia, 2019
Porcelain and Gold Sculpture
Dimensions: 15 H x 5 W x 5 D in.
One of a Kind.
Alex Hodge was always drawn to the arts and regularly channeled her creativity as a child whether in watercolor classes or scrapbooking with her mother. Hodge focuses on prioritizing women’s narratives in all aspects of her work. Through the decorative and symbolic details, she hints at narratives without completing them to invite the viewer to participate in creating meaning. The women she invents exist in the present but is of the imagined future in which we all have room to flourish, to tell our stories, to give and receive love, and to express the beauty and pain of the human condition. Fundamentally, her artworks are a celebration of the tenacity and vulnerability of women and clay, an interplay of history and hope.
