Part 1 of Essay
was born in 1930 near Falenty, Poland. She studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and sought to escape from the conventional art forms through weaving. Abakanowicz creates sculpture in bronze, wood, steel, ceramic, and burlap. Her main subjects are human and animal figures presented in large groups of 50, 80, or 150 ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature’s abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm.” ....