An Interview with Liturgical Sculptor Deborah Luke
In clay and bronze, sculptor Deborah Luke draws form and meaning from scripture.
On a breezy, warm December day at Deborah Luke’s Baton Rouge studio, doors and windows stood open—a small, clay study of a Rwandan priest propping the door against the breeze. An eight-foot-tall clay model—or “positive”—of a crucifix titled “Christ Victorious” shared space with smaller, but no less powerful, pieces in various media and stages of completion. On a modeling table, Joseph rested alone and exhausted against the flank of a donkey—Luke’s interpretation of “The Flight Into Egypt” as told in the Gospel of Matthew. On an easel, relief panels in hydrostone depict scenes from the Canticle of the Sun. On the studio’s shelves, angels, saints, animals, and the bust of a bishop stand beside buckets of modeling clay and mud-spattered kitchen appliances—a union between the earthly and the divine.
A lifelong Louisianan, Deborah Luke is a liturgical sculptor who has spent twenty-five years exploring the mysteries of faith in clay, bronze, and stone. In the Christian liturgy she finds an inexhaustible supply of subject matter and creative inspiration. “The artistic impulse and the faith impulse: I find so much joy combining those two facets of my life,” she observed. “That’s what scripture is about. It’s not just random stories about random people. It’s about unconditional love. There is such joy in being able to meditate on things in a concrete way.”
Luke began her artistic journey working in two dimensions, before she discovered the thrill of the third. As a child, she was obsessed with the human face. “First I drew the face, then in college I began sculpting the face.” The move to three dimensions felt right immediately, she said, noting that some artists consider drawing more difficult than sculpture, because of the sleight of hand required to represent three dimensions in two.
"That’s what scripture is about. It’s not just random stories about random people. It’s about unconditional love. There is such joy in being able to meditate on things in a concrete way.” —Deborah Luke
In the early seventies Luke attended St. Mary’s Dominican College in New Orleans, where she learned from the internationally-known sculptor Angela Gregory. Gregory was a graduate of Newcomb College, who in 1925 traveled to Paris to study under the great French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle—who himself had been a student of Auguste Rodin. When sculpting a face, Luke remembers Gregory admonishing her students to think in terms of planes—the varying surfaces of a three-dimensional object and the ways they capture and reflect light. “Angela would say ‘When you’re doing a face, don’t think ‘nose.’ Don’t think ‘eyes.’ Think ‘planes,’” she said.
Luke traces her focus on the liturgical to a trip that she and her husband, Barry, took to Rome, Italy, in 1996. “The turning point for me was standing in St. Peter’s [Basilica] and looking at The Pietà,” she said. “I thought, ‘Why are so many people drawn to this image?’ It wasn’t just the aesthetic beauty, it was that this was the depiction of truth,” she said. “It was a depiction of love, of God. That just took hold of me.” When Luke returned to Louisiana, she sculpted a small replica of Michelangelo’s masterpiece in clay. “It was a chance for me to prolong the meditative moment.”
Working primarily in oil-based modeling clay, Luke searches scripture for forms that she feels might not just convey the essence of a Biblical story, but also resonate with the faithful in a meaningful way. Once an idea comes, she will sit with a piece of clay and work it until a form begins to emerge. “Clay is such a malleable medium in which to watch an impulse grow,” she said. “Every time I start is like a rebirth.” To create the initial model, or “positive,” Luke hand-shapes smaller, more compact works (such as Joseph and the resting donkey) with clay alone, then utilizes a slender finishing tool to realize those all-important planes. Larger or free-standing pieces (the eight-foot figure of Christ crucified, for example) require an internal supporting structure, or “armature,” which Barry takes the lead on building. Once Luke is satisfied with her clay model, she and Barry create a negative mold, coating the first positive with rubber, then with a supporting “mother mold” of plaster or plastic. Step three is to pour successive layers of molten wax into the mold to create a hollow replica. Then an “investment,” or ceramic shell, is created by dipping the wax replica into a heat-resistant liquid, then coating it with a heat-resistant sand. This creates the final negative into which the molten bronze will be poured. Enormously labor-intensive, this “lost wax” technique of creating bronze sculpture has changed little in centuries. A large piece can take months to complete, and Luke is quick to note that, without the expert assistance that her husband, Barry, brings to each project, realizing the final bronzes would be impossible. “They say art is long. But sculpture is longer,” remarked Luke. “Students will sometimes say, ‘Isn’t there an easier way to do this?’ I say ‘No!’”
"They say art is long. But sculpture is longer,” remarked Luke. “Students will sometimes say, ‘Isn’t there an easier way to do this?’ I say ‘No!’”
For the ten or fifteen years that followed that revelatory trip to Rome, Luke created sculpture using her own inspirations from scripture. She worked her way through the Mysteries of the Rosary and the Gospels of Saints John and Luke. Then commissions began to arrive, from houses of worship all over the country. “So now my process is: someone will say, ‘Can you do something with ‘Jesus calling Peter from the boat?’ and I’ll see what I can make of it.” Today, Luke’s sculptures can be found across the United States—and are popular throughout Catholic South Louisiana. At St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Baton Rouge, Luke’s Gentle Hands memorial is a high relief sculpture made in memory of children lost to miscarriage or in early infancy. At First United Methodist Church, a set of ten relief sculptures depict the Stations of the Cross. At the new Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, a bronze of two children on a swing memorializes two young lives lost in a house fire.
In learning to combine the mysteries of faith with the artistic impulse, Luke found her calling. Her focus shifted from the human to the divine. “All art starts with an impulse to give form, shape, to an idea,” she observed. “With a portrait it’s an impulse to capture the spirit of something, rather than a literal copy. Liturgical sculpture is the same: capture something and filter it through the artist. I want to have it come through me in a way that others can access and appreciate.”
To see a YouTube video of Deborah and Barry Luke building the mold for Christ Victorious, visit youtu.be/oYeBAdsYN0o.
In January, Deborah Luke will be profiled on LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, January 7 at 8:30 pm or Saturday, January 8 at 5:30 pm across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.