Saturn
Strength
I think of strength as endurance: not the ability to overpower something, but the ability to remain, adapt, and keep going. In my own life, it has rarely looked like strength while I was going through something. Sometimes it looked like patience. Sometimes it looked like impatience. Only once something was behind me could I see that getting through it was the strength.
Finding the Rings
I'd planned to represent Saturn's rings literally. Then I realized the tree already had its own.
A tree keeps its rings inside, where no one sees them. Year after year, they record the good seasons and the hard ones, and the tree keeps both. Saturn, fittingly, has long been associated with time.
Around the tree, iridescent glass shifts between gold, blue, violet and green as the light moves. Against the rough, dark bark, it glows, creating a luminous, otherworldly space for this strange tree-person-planet.
Everything around the face carries the marks of what it's been through. The face has seen it all, and still manages that half-smile. That's the kind of strength I mean.
When I started thinking about Saturn, I pulled the "failed Venus" back out and saw something different. There was maturity in it, and that twisted little half-smile suggested a sardonic sense of humor, even a kind of cynical compassion. I hadn't changed the face. I had changed what I was looking for.
It hadn't failed. It had just shown up for the wrong planet.
Growing Saturn
A tree made sense for this kind of strength. Trees live through drought, damage and loss. They lose branches and grow others. What happens to them becomes part of how they grow.
So I grew a tree around the face, building it directly onto the piece with epoxy clay: the trunk rising from below, branches reaching out around it. I twisted branches and carved bark, knots and hollows. I wanted the tree to look as though things had happened to it. A perfect tree wouldn't have made much sense.
A Wrong Face
The face I sculpted didn't begin as Saturn. I started out trying to make Venus, but my efforts weren't taking me where I wanted to go. Nothing wrong with what I made. It just wasn't Venus. So I put it aside.