"Penelope Shroud"

In the photo are two views of a sculpture I call Penelope’s Shroud: on your left, stage view, and on your right, opposing view. Balanced upon a rough stone stage, the figure is made from rooted trees that once lived, transformed over millennia into petrified wood, and black nylon stretched over wire that can disintegrate within a single human lifetime. These radically different materials are what make the sculpture breathe.

The black nylon is stretched and twisted like a literal shroud. It completely envelops the core of the figure, creating an unseen, secret space where she is caught in an impasse.

She

The entire composition rests on a rough, planar stone base with carved lines at the floor representing her invisible loom. This acts as a literal stage, transforming her struggle and her daily work into a theatrical performance for the unwanted suitors watching her every move. This shrouded space traps the figure within an unseen boundary. 

From the stage view, she is a dancer in a shroud, staging a quiet show of compliance as she pulls at the threads of her emotional restraint. Petrified wood remembers geological time. Nylon records the present tension. One material cannot move; the other can stretch almost to breaking. The materials are talking to one another before the viewer even begins to interpret them. Meaning accumulates through movement. Everything else becomes confirmation.

But some sculptures ask us to walk around them. Others ask us to dance with them. Every step changes the story. Some sculptures don't tell stories by depicting glorified events; they tell them by changing as we move. A myth may give a piece its title, but the sculpture gives the myth another life, holding two realities together—the public performance and the private endurance. It does this through movement and stillness.

Without its title, we encounter a dancer. With it, we begin to recognize Penelope. The title is not attached to the sculpture. It is one of its materials.

Shifting to the opposing view, we see almost an unbalanced pivot. She is a captive straining against a tight leash. You can feel the stretching limits of the nylon that represent her emotional breaking point. It creates an intense feeling of an unstable momentum—she is permanently caught in the middle of a perilous balancing act, unleashing a dynamic force in a desperate attempt to break free.

The physical form isn’t the story; it is a place where stories happen.

Literature unfolds in time.

Painting unfolds in the eye.

Sculpture unfolds in space.

Meaning doesn’t arrive sentence by sentence, it accumulates as the body moves.

When I began writing about this physical confinement, I was surprised to find myself remembering Michel Foucault’s seminal little book, The Utopian Body. The sculpture remembered it before I did. Through petrified wood and nylon, my hands held the tactile truth of a struggle I couldn't yet name. Foucault merely named it. I was already navigating the confinement: Break physical

'my body is the place without recourse to which I am condemned.'

We see this condemnation take physical shape within the very boundaries of the stage. Bound to the unyielding platform, the figure does not merely occupy space; it uses the desperate grace of the dance to tear at its own physical limits, transforming a site of confinement into a theater of beautiful, agonizing freedom. Caught in an eternal balancing act, bound by a dark textile that acts as both garment and cage, the form executes a delicate, desperate choreography. It speaks to a life on pause, where every movement is watched, and the daily act of creation is merely a tactical delay against an unwanted audience.

The heavy permanence of the stone-like stage forms a silent watchtower, demanding absolute compliance. Its authority is never questioned.

Every day the body gathers itself. Every night it quietly undoes what survival requires. The dance repeats itself. Stretching. Waiting. Unraveling. Beginning again.

This duality is exhausting. Its material pulls in one direction; its body in another. The central figure—her body fossilized into ancient wood—stands as a monument to endurance, frozen in a permanent state of waiting. She reminds me of a little girl’s first jewelry box: you lift the lid, and there is the dancer, trapped in an endless cycle of theater, spinning round and round.

Captured in the quiet desperation of a domestic fortress, Penelope stands pinned to a stone stage where time is weaponized, spun, and undone to keep an encroaching world at bay. This theatrical confinement is anchored by a central pillar—wood turned to ancient stone—and a rock-slab backing that acts as both a physical architectural wall and the barrier of her invisible loom, complete with traces of carved thread trailing near the floor.

The stage is always trying to dictate how the body moves. But my dancer plays a different game. By blending petrified wood with fluid black nylon, the figure performs a quiet sabotage—stalling the stage, unweaving the system's control thread by thread. It is a slow, rhythmic unraveling. It is a dance women learn long before they have words for it. It is the art of staying in motion just to survive, trapped by structures, yet proving that the dance can outlast the stone. Yet, mirroring Penelope’s shroud, this imprisonment is never absolute; the dancer wages a quiet war of resistance, fighting back through a secret unraveling only to be inevitably interlaced once more.

Through the eyes of this sculpture, the epic quietly changes its center. The monsters are no longer only those encountered across the sea. They are also the unseen forces that enter a home and ask life to remain suspended. 

Penelope's shroud wrapped around an empty space offers both shelter and resistance.

The shroud never quite comes to rest. As we move, light slips through the translucent black nylon, revealing and concealing the armature beneath. The movement belongs neither to the sculpture nor to the viewer alone. It arises in the encounter between them.

Penelope holds time open through the quiet choreography of waiting. The sculpture asks us to do the same. 

In a world that breaks; art binds.

Sherburn LaBelle

August 9, 2026

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