Mentor
The sculpture Mentor has a unique relationship between the face of Mother Earth and the figures of her children. Mother Earth is richly colored, with a spreading white headdress decorated with an extravagant felted Kazakh-style shyrdak design in deep indigo blue. The pair of figures on her forehead are a mentor holding two minuscule matchstick-type figures, and a creative artist who is making an another one between her hands. The creative artist wears a white felted hat with a tiny pearl. The creative artist's feet are planted directly on Mother Earth's eyebrows, with which she seems to be content. The mentor is dressed all in white and wears of crown of brass bells cast in India, symbolizing a heavenly sound. Behind the pair there is a lotus flower, in which a third figure is meditating with a bell.
Mother Earth's face is powerful, yet calm and happy, even smiling in some angles of view. Her spirit infuses the figures in their active creation and inner concentration.
The face is handwoven in Merrill's Zati method with dark gray handspun over-dyed with wild indigo. The cheeks have goldenrod-dyed handspun diamonds with tiny madder centers. Between the diamonds and the face run two contrasting textured lines of natural white, black, madder and indigo over gray.