Lucretius speaks of the spirit and mind being composed of same physical matter that comprises the flesh body. And while the spirit and mind are distinct components of sentience they can be separated from the body, in a similar manner to the other limbs of the body. However the spirit-mind cannot exist without the flesh body and as they are composed of the same matter the spirit-mind is also mortal.
In Dante’s Inferno the poet Dante and his guide Virgil encounter Lucretius in the outermost ring of hell reserved for the “honorable pagans”. This is important to show Dante’s familiarity with the works of Lucretius and that he was thinking about the corporeality of the spirit-mind as his poet descended towards cocytus. Dante encounters a series of souls who not only resemble the form of their formerly alive earth-inhabiting bodies but also are capable of experiencing pain inferring that the spirits themselves have a physicality.
In the early 20th century T.S. Eliot continued this line of inquiry while his engagement with Dante is well documented it is particularly in the poem The Hollow Men which captures his thoughts on the matter. The operative word is hollow, the inference being that the physical body has within it a vacuum (again a term borrowed from Lucretius) a cavity that is filled or was once filled with something that has been since hollowed out. The exact nature of the substance and the reasoning for its hollowness Eliot leaves vague and mysterious.
Sculpture is uniquely suited to continue this line of questioning. As the form of sculpture itself confronts the topology of space and place. Particularly within the confines of the body and establishes the body as both the site (place) as well as the boundary of space.
The sculptures are hollow bodies themselves, made through assembled and layered materials as a skin. They become in this case both Eliot’s Hollow Men and through their formal distortion and their weightlessness Dante’s spirits experiencing for eternity punishments and pleasures.