BORDER	FIGURES
Sketches of ancient figurines by P. Ruiz-Bayon
[CONT'D.] From about 1000 BC to 100 AD the figurines were made by hand. After that, they were made in a mold, although sometimes the heads continued to be handmade, perhaps as portraits. This was a major shift, Parsons notes, perhaps suggesting a change in the purposes they served. Anthropologists and archaeologists study artifacts like the figurines as a way to understand ancient social organization, Parsons says, "while art historians look at them in another way and artists in a still different way. I'm quantitatively oriented. I look at the patterns in style, form, where they were found, and try to make broad generalizations. Recently, borrowing techniques from physics, I've been looking more closely at their chemical composition. Patricia looks at them through a different filter."

In more than two years of reading, sketching and sculpting, Ruiz-Bayon's "filter" extracted those qualities of the figurines that she wished to reawaken in her own art. The result was a sculptural series she calls The Figurine Project, which won her one of eight yearly fellowships from the U-M Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She made seven female figures in three media for the project.

"I portrayed a lot of things in a woman's body that are shamed in American culture," she says. "I did not want to portray idealized beauty of hips, breasts, height, weight and proportion. To see someone adopt that ideal like Cher, with all those surgeries and dieting, makes me weep. She is a plastic person, denying her natural body. We have hips that are quite big, but instead of rejoicing in that, women diet and go through surgeries seeking an unattainable ideal in a painful attempt to alter themselves. My figurines say, 'This is what I am.'

"I did my first group in bronze based on my drawings of the original terra cotta figurines," she says. "I wanted to work in the Art School's foundry and discovered it to be very male-oriented, I'm sorry to say. Not just here but around the world, there is a feeling that metal is a man's substance to control, so you undergo a sort of hazing because you're trying to use heavy machinery and heavy materials. Kent Brown and others wound up helping me very much. Casting, itself, is wonderful. Dealing with fire, such a primitive and powerful force, you have to be precise. I created my own Bronze Age and became 'the maker' as a Mexican-American woman living at the end of this century and millennium."

Her project's second phase was to make seven terra-cotta versions covered in gold leaf. "The Spanish taught our people how to gild the Spaniards' baroque churches, using us as slaves to do it," Ruiz-Bayon says. "Gilding is now in our culture. I gilded the figurines to give the treasure of the gold back to our people, back to women, back to me, and to make a progression of the figures into the new century."

The third figurine phase, recently begun by Ruiz-Bayon, involves hand-made glass versions containing a bubbling red liquid. "I thought of myself as Dr. Ruizenstein," she quips. "I was almost electrocuted as a child, so I'd been very frightened of electricity. Now I can work with it, but I am still careful. I wanted to do something that marked the end of the 20th century. I didn't know how to turn on a computer when I came to Michigan; now I'm working with a little computer-controlled electric motor that makes them bubble as if they're alive."

Ruiz-Bayon cradles her bubbling, broad-hipped and buxom figurine and says, "I have recreated myself in the three stages of this project. They tell a story. My story."