The Leader (Guarding the Flock)

This carved-wood tableau stages a quiet drama of scale: a procession of simplified figures advances like a communal memory, only to be eclipsed by a monumental head whose bowed weight turns presence into burden. The warm polish and varied grains act as a kind of biography—each body similar in silhouette yet irreducibly different in tone—while the long, tapering plinth reads as both path and hierarchy, compressing the crowd toward a vanishing point. In the tension between the anonymous multitude and the singular giant, the work suggests how authority can both shelter and suffocate, leaving the smallest forms at the edges suspended between witness and abandonment.