Picture a Sculpture Screaming: My Relationship with Fear

Mallory Mills

Fear is universal. It’s instilled within our very bones from a young age: don’t cross the busy road, don’t eat the strange weed, don’t speak to that suspicious stranger.

Fear is universal. It’s instilled within our very bones from a young age: don’t cross the busy road, don’t eat the strange weed, don’t speak to that suspicious stranger.

Installation view of nightshifts, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2023. Featuring Ricky Swallow, Picture a Screaming Sculpture 2003. Michael Buxton Collection, the University of Melbourne Art Collection. Photography by Christian Capurro. 

My own experience with fear has stretched the length of almost two decades. I say almost, for there must have been a time in my early childhood when fear did not touch me, when the very idea of it was foreign to the fickle recklessness of youth. But as far into the past as I can recall, I have been tempered by fear wherever I go, its incalculable weight slowing my every step with dogged persistence.

As a child, I was often arrested by a strange sense of premonition, as though I were conscious of a consequence for an act I had not yet committed. It was a stifling kind of apprehension, like a perpetually held breath—waiting in anguish for the other shoe to drop. But it was an anxiety borne of the strangest actions. Should I place a mug atop my kitchen counter, I was struck with the notion that I’d placed it wrong, that it was facing the wrong direction...and if I did not remedy this at once, something truly horrible would happen. Something disproportionately horrible, too, like a fire would break out in the kitchen because I’d put the lid back on the sugar jar wrong— though how one could incorrectly place a lid, I do not know. This fear also made a strict penitent of me; I was incapable of keeping a single secret from my parents, for I was certain any crime, no matter how mild, would trigger the occurrence of some imagined disaster.

If my parents told me to come inside from the background in five minutes and I stayed for ten, I’d immediately rush to them and expel my disobedience in a shameful rush. It was to a point in which my parents were bewildered; why should they care that I’d had an extra cookie, or neglected to close the laundry room door all the way? ‘Confessing’ to my parents worked to assuage this fear for a while, but soon it lost its soothing effect, and, conscious of annoying my parents, I looked for other ways to remedy my ‘wrongdoings.’. If I placed a cup down wrong, I’d move it around until I found the perfect spot…which could only really be discerned by the dispersal of the anxiety in my chest. This could take mere seconds or upwards of thirty minutes, and if I was discovered by a member of my family, I’d have to play it off as a strange new quirk. Of course, my odd behaviour could not go unnoticed for long, and as I grew older, my family began to speculate about me in stage whispers and raised eyebrows. From this grew my own resentment—didn’t they understand I’d stayed up until 3 am the night prior washing my hands to prevent their gruesome, untimely deaths?

It took a handful of years later for me to understand that I was not, in fact, administered strange tasks by God to prevent the deaths of my loved ones, but instead just another victim of OCD. By then, of course, I’d begun experiencing panic attacks and bouts of anxiety so vicious it knotted my stomach and stole my appetite; OCD and anxiety sort of go hand-in-hand, a buy-one-get-one-free deal of the worst kind.

For the majority of my teenage years, fear was all I knew. Each day presented me with the opportunity to develop new anxieties around everyday mundanities, until I was no better than a cat jumping at its own shadow. For this reason, fear has always held a different connotation to me than it might’ve my peers. Fear is not the shark-infested waters of a pitch-black sea, or the hissing maw of a venomous snake—though I have always harboured a particular terror-borne disdain of spiders. Rather, fear has always felt as much a part of me as my own heart and lungs, intrinsic to my very being, woven between muscle and sinew so intricately that to extract it would be to inflict great damage upon my well-being.

“Ghoulish. Other-worldly. Confronting in its abnormality. Every line meticulous—every line horrifying. Hewn from bone-white wood, its mouth frozen in a perpetual scream, eyes wide with unimagined terror. The very embodiment of fear.”

Perhaps this is why I was drawn to Swallow’s piece: by all accounts, it is perhaps one of the most comprehensive works of the entire exhibit. In a room full of intangible shape and form, Swallow presents a well-crafted pop-culture icon, recognisable to even the most unwilling of horror critics. Seemingly, the piece has little to offer beyond this. But the depth of the terror fixed upon the sculpture’s face is as familiar to me as an old friend, it’s every line and edge encapsulating a childhood of emotional distress of my own making. As I stood before it in that dim gallery, memorising its every feature—from the silver of the wood, to the oblivion of the background— I imagined it was the embodiment of that fear, like my biggest enemy had finally been revealed to me in a shape I could understand.

Ghoulish. Other-worldly. Confronting in its abnormality. Every line meticulous—every line horrifying. Hewn from bone-white wood, its mouth frozen in a perpetual scream, eyes wide with unimagined terror. The very embodiment of fear.

There’s a movement to the piece that unsettles the eye the moment it rests upon it; sculptures are immobile pieces of work, captured forever in a singular pose. But the expertise with which its hood has been rendered breathes life into every fold and stitch, giving the impression of flight. Indeed, the piece seems to hover in empty space like some inescapable omen, looming over the viewer with that unnervingly petrified expression. Shadow and light converge to further harness this effect; the dark tones of the work are stark, throwing the hollows of its eyes and mouth into sharp relief. So deep-set are these orifices that the face appears world-weary and deeply troubled, creating an impression of bags beneath the eye sockets, as though the sculpture has suffered from many a sleepless night.

The inky recesses of its background seek to exemplify this, enhancing each shadow until the white of the wood is brighter even than the paint of the wall on which it is mounted. It is downright spooky like this, drifting untethered in complete darkness, the lines of its cloak flapping in some invisible breeze. Perhaps this is the true nature of fear, of terror: it’s a scream swallowed up by the blackness of night, a terror so great it is etched into the very planes of one’s face, never to be soothed.

There is a circularity to this piece, in which the sculpture both haunts the viewer with its ghoulish appearance, and is, in turn, haunted by some unknown assailant— be they physical or not. To encapsulate such a piece in one sentence would be to do it a disservice, but alas, I shall try: it is a state of limbo, in which the viewer awaits with baited breath for a scream that will never be released—one that will never be heard. Perhaps, then, its suspension in the air is a visual representation of the suspension of fear—apprehension and anxiety, its co-conspirators, forever trapping us within a cycle of uncertainty and doubt. As I gazed upon it, I myself almost kept expecting it to expel a scream—and was simultaneously relieved and disappointed when it did not.

The dimness of the Nightshifts exhibit serves to further exemplify the otherworldliness of this piece, lending it a mystical, fantastical element. One might almost imagine this sculpture to be the face of the grim reaper, a death God summoned to capture souls and condemn them to an eternity in the afterlife. The light illuminating it from above emphasises the mysticism of the exhibit; one can almost suppose themselves to be traipsing through a shadowed forest, drawn to each work for the illuminating bulb braced above their frames.

This is how I came to find Swallow’s piece, after all: with complete coincidence, stumbling upon it blindly with all the grace of a newborn deer. Once I’d fixed my eyes upon it, however, it became increasingly harder to look away, and every time I made a lap of the room, I kept returning to that pale, screaming face, unwilling or unable to dismiss it as just another feature of the exhibit.

Death and fear, of course, are inextricably linked. We are trained to fear death from the moment of our birth, and we retain that fear— ironically—until we die, and are thus incapable of fearing anything at all. So it is not unreasonable to look upon that terrified face and see the grim reaper, or any other death deity, in its finely sculptured lines.

Fear is an innate part of the human experience, as integral as happiness or sadness or love. It grips the human spirit between icy fingers, clenching, clenching, until our breaths become short and tears prick our eyes and we tremble all over like a branch in a storm. In fact, fear might be one of the only connecting factors across all walks of life and states of being. A person might go their whole lives without truly encountering love— as dreary a thought as that may be— but fear? Fear is universal. It’s instilled within our very bones from a young age: don’t cross the busy road, don’t eat the strange weed, don’t speak to that suspicious stranger.

We’re taught to fear the world and seek out anything that may endeavour to do us harm. This brand of fear, however, is one born of self-preservation – and is thus healthy in reasonable doses. If we were born fearless, we’d jump heedlessly from great heights with not an inkling of concern for the resulting consequences. As we grow older, however, we are plagued with fears more sinister in nature, the oft-irrational kind that keep us up nights working ourselves into sweat-laden frenzies. Of course, it is expected that we ‘grow out of our fears’ upon reaching adolescence. To fear is to be childish, after all. Instead, we apply a new label: anxiety. Anxiety is an acceptable thing for an adult to grapple with, often falling within medical categorisation and thus lending it a credibility that the act of ‘being scared’ does not possess. However, anxiety is just the amalgamation of hundreds of fears, culminating in an experience much like that of a haunting: ceaseless, constant, lingering in the wake of any bad thought or strange feeling. This is what I see in the face of Swallow’s work: not some incalculable beast of horror, but the product of weeks and months of anxiety, wearing away at a person until all that remains is an expression of sheer, inescapable terror.

A few years ago, I would’ve told you I despised the very notion of fear; if I had the ability to do so, I would’ve wished it away no matter the consequences. But in the months since, I’ve come to understand fear differently, and gained a sense of compassion for my former self. As destructive as it can be, fear wants only to protect from the potential dangers of life—of which there are many. And if I imagine Swallow’s work as a physical amalgamation of fear, it would only make sense that the creature’s intentions not be malicious in nature, but rather nurturing instead. If I approach Swallow’s work like this, it garners compassion within me, a fondness for both the artist and the art.

And in the throes of my own panic, I like to imagine that sculptured face and its terror-stricken expression, and suppose that rather than seeking to scare me further, it’s instead keeping my fears for itself, storing them away so that I might continue on in life unhindered by my anxieties.