By the later 1970s, John Kavik’s mother and child groups had moved well beyond the relatively descriptive treatment of his earlier work. Often, as in the present example, the woman and her babe are compressed into a broad, weighty sculptural mass, their individual bodies separated only by a few incised lines. The effect is one of intimacy expressed through sheer physical attachment. The child seems almost absorbed into the mother’s form, making the group feel at once monumental and intensely close.

Particularly charming, and perhaps an unintended but delightful consequence of Kavik’s bored, drilled eye holes, is the woman’s distinctly frazzled, exhausted expression. It lends the sculpture a wonderfully human note, one that anyone acquainted with the demands of a young baby may recognize immediately.