Nike, 2022

Marble (carrara white, bardiglio), stainless steel hardware; Overall height: 57cm x 110cm x 288cm (the block is 152cm high).

It is the victory, stretching into the sky, based on a fossil, a sharks tooth.

Nike returns to the same source material as Guardian — the petrified shark's tooth. Carved in a white Carrara Marble and placed on a high plinth of Bardiglio marble, the piece stretches upward with the same gesture the fossil suggests at any scale: an ascent, a reaching, a figure caught between

rising and departing.
The title is a direct acknowledgment of a connection others made before I did. Viewers who encountered earlier works in this series repeatedly likened the winged, upward form to the Winged Victory of Samothrace — arguably the most celebrated sculpture to survive from the Hellenistic world, and itself a figure of arrival, departure, and safe passage, originally sited at a harbour's edge. I hadn't set out to make that reference; but the comparison pointed to something true about the fossil itself; a shape worn smooth by millions of years of sea and sand already carries the same essential gesture that sculptors were carving in stone over two thousand years ago. Nike is my acknowledgment of that continuity — a small marble sculpture of an idea that is, in a sense, far older than either sculpture. It's scale becomes larger than human.

As a reminder of the famous “Victory of Samothrace”, this sculpture is reaching into the sky. Based on a fossil, a sharks tooth, it rests between animal and mineral, between feather and bone, a winged creature solidified in stone.
Somigliante alla famosa Nike di Samothrace, la Nike di Vanessa Paschakarnis è una scultura basata su un fossile. Tra animale e minerale, tra una piuma e un osso, questa splendida creazione sembra pronta a volare con le ali spiegate!