Bronze and Stone, 240cm x 150cm x 140cm high.

"Eternal Breath" is reflecting on our ways of relating to life and death and the complexity of it all. The bovine creature is wearing a mask of bronze, poetically confirming our being in the world.

Vanessa Paschakarnis presents Eternal Breath, a major new sculpture combining Nova Scotia red marble and bronze, realised in her Pietrasanta studio. The work marks a significant development in the artist's long-standing exploration of the animal body as a metaphor for human experience.
A massive bull-like form, carved from the deep crimson stone of Paschakarnis's adopted Canadian homeland, crouches low beneath two great sweeping bronze horns. Its face is a bronze mask, and at its centre blooms an intricately worked flower: tender, precise, almost impossibly delicate against the animal's compressed mass. From the creature's mouth emerges a moth, cast in celestial blue-grey patinated bronze, its wings fanning outward to the ground in a wide, luminous arc. It is the breath of the beast, its desire made visible and permanent.
Throughout her career, Paschakarnis has used the moth as a symbol of the human urge to transcend physical limitation, the drive toward light, warmth, and the luminous at whatever cost. In Eternal Breath, this longing is not merely represented but embodied: it is the involuntary exhale of the creature itself, inseparable from the act of being alive. By casting it in bronze, the most enduring of sculptural materials, the artist fixes the most ephemeral of acts into permanent form. The title says it plainly: this breath, this desire, will not dissolve.
Working at the intersection of the mythic and the phenomenological, Paschakarnis continues to position herself as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary object based sculpture. Eternal Breath synthesises the whole of her practice, stone and bronze, beast and breath, power and vulnerability, into a single image of quiet devastation.

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