Fonny’s first sculpture

Fonny’s first sculpture is a small black-wood figure given to Sharon nearly two years before Tish recalls it. Its spare, troubled form joins the circumstances of Fonny’s artistic independence to the pressures surrounding young people in his community: he rejects the future prescribed for him at vocational school and finds a practice he wants to pursue. The sculpture remains both a domestic object, displayed apart in Sharon’s living room, and a record of that choice.

Form and Display

The sculpture is not very high and is carved from black wood. It depicts an unclothed man with one hand at his forehead and the other partly concealing his body. The figure’s legs are unusually long and set far apart; one foot seems planted in place, giving the whole pose a sense of torment and arrested movement. Tish says the figure makes her think of Joseph, though she does not explain the association further.

Sharon places the work by itself on a small table in the living room. Its separate display gives Fonny’s first piece a distinct place in the family home. Rather than being treated as one more household possession, it is kept visible as a work whose unusual form invites sustained attention.

Making the Sculpture

Fonny’s path to the sculpture began at a vocational school where students were taught to make items such as card tables, hassocks, and chests of drawers. Tish views the school’s instruction as limiting: it directs young people toward handwork while denying their intelligence and discouraging them from becoming more capable. Fonny rejects that prescribed training and leaves the school, taking tools and much of the woodworking material with him.

The materials were difficult to remove discreetly. Fonny gathered tools on one day and wood on another, then, with a friend, broke into the school after dark and took much of the woodwork shop’s stock. They loaded the wood into the friend’s brother’s car. Some of it was hidden in the basement of a sympathetic janitor’s home; Fonny brought the tools to Tish’s house, and some of the wood remained beneath her bed. These practical details connect the sculpture to a wider effort to secure the means of making work on Fonny’s own terms.

Gift and Chronology

Fonny gave the sculpture to Sharon after a period of distance from Tish. When Fonny was twenty-one and Tish was eighteen, he kissed her good-night; afterward, he stayed away for two or three weeks. During that interval, he made the wooden figure. On the Saturday he gave it to Sharon, he and Tish left the house and walked together, newly aware that their relationship had changed. The gift therefore falls at a turning point in their closeness, although the sculpture itself is presented as Fonny’s work rather than as an explanation of his feelings.

Artistic and Social Significance

Tish understands Fonny’s discovery of woodworking as a decisive alternative to the destructive paths confronting many young people around them. She describes a social world that tells children they are worthless and then seems to confirm that judgment; Fonny, by contrast, finds something he can do and wants to do. The sculpture gives physical form to that self-directed capacity, while the labor of acquiring tools and wood shows how little support the school system offered him for pursuing it.

The figure’s fixed foot and strained posture suggest confinement without making the sculpture a simple illustration of one circumstance. Its meaning remains connected both to the difficult conditions of Fonny’s life and to Tish’s personal association with Joseph. As Fonny’s first sculpture, it marks the beginning of a practice that gives him an alternative to the future others have attempted to assign him.