Oneness in the Dead Heart

Few modern artists express mystical insights in vividly concrete terms because so few even try. Last week word reached U.S. of an Australian sculptor who is trying--hard. William Ricketts' baked-clay figures may be far from great but they are good, and the sculptor's spirit makes them news.

A TIME reporter found Ricketts camped in a dry creek bed near the reservation of the aboriginal Arunta tribe, in central Australia's arid Dead Heart. Set up like votive images along the creek bed were mysterious figures modeled with devoted exactitude. Among them: a sitting aboriginal patriarch, lifesize, squinting into the sun; a girl, half encased in rock, smiling softly; a man with Ricketts' own head and the body of a kangaroo, petting a possum. What on earth, the reporter want-to know, were the figures for?

Ricketts, a wiry, blue-eyed man of 50 sat on a packing case under the burning sun and buzzing clouds of flies, and happily told his story. He was born in the slums of a Melbourne suburb, but managed to learn the violin. He fiddled with theater orchestras until he was 30 "Then suddenly I realized that the violin was not the medium to express my message I just got the idea the way to do that was through my hands. They practically tingled So I built a hut on a mountain and started modeling in clay. I've had no training; my hands just do it." When it came to explaining his sculptures, Ricketts paused, picking up handfuls of hot sand and letting it run through his thin fingers. He had been inspired by the legends and the creativeness (see below) of the aborigines, he said, and had gradually come to know and love the aboriginal people themselves. Deciding that "one must have the soul of all his fellow men " and that the aborigines were closer to God than most, he dedicated himself to celebrating the beliefs and virtues of their waning race. The aboriginal patriarch was a clay portrait of Tjipuntja, an intimate friend; the girl in the rock illustrated the aborigines' belief that the evening star is a beautiful girl who fades each night into the cliffs; the self-portrait with a kangaroo body was to show that the animals are one with mankind. Said Sculptor Ricketts: "Mankind must be made aware that there is no such thing as separateness. bven the veriest grain of sand is part of the oneness of God's creatures."

Ricketts' simple needs are supplied by Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and sciences. The museum director A R Penfold, justifies the expense in'a single sentence: "This man is undoubtedly a genius." Not many Australian critics are aware of Ricketts, and of those who are ew share Penfold's vast enthusiasm for his art. Emotional self-expression, they complain, is absent from Ricketts' sculptures But self-expression is only one goal of art Ricketts, squatting beneath his wilderness gum tree to model as best he can in clay has a broader and loftier aim.

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