Bill Waltier (Blind from Birth)

'Marble is the material used to commemorate heroes, and these people seem to me to be a new kind of hero—people who instead of conquering the outside world have conquered their own inner world.'
- Marc Quinn

Bill Waltier (Blind from birth) (2005) is a provocative reimagining of the classical bust portrait by renowned British artist Marc Quinn. It forms part of The Complete Marbles, an acclaimed body of work produced between 1999 and 2005 that took inspiration from ancient Greek sculptures, such as the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and The Louvre’s Venus de Milo. Though damaged, fragmented, and often limbless, these luminescent marble figures have come to represent an ‘ideal’ beauty. Indeed, fascinated by the reverence surrounding classical sculpture, Quinn worked with traditional marble masons in Pietrasanta, Italy, to represent real and modern-day bodies with disabilities or ‘imperfections’. These works serve to highlight the latent contradictions in art history, and the cultural power of perfection.

Ancient marble statues were typically painted, and many today therefore feature uncannily blank, unchiselled eyes. Quinn reinterpreted this classical trait through portrait heads of two individuals who had been born blind: Bill Waltier and Anna Cannings. ‘When they touched their portraits it was the first time they had “seen” themselves in the way they “see” others, with touch’, he said. ‘If the original marble sculptures were, in a way, taking the fragmented statuary literally, by finding models whose real bodies were like that, these were taking the blind eyes of Roman portrait busts literally and making them mean what they seem to say’ (M. Quinn quoted in Marc Quinn: Recent Sculpture, exh. cat., Groninger Museum, Groningen 2006, p. 36).

Born in 1964, Quinn rose to prominence in London in the early 1990s as one of the founding figures of the Young British Artists. He is known for his irreverent and trailblazing practice: Self (1991), a sculptural head created entirely from his own frozen blood was his defining contribution to the canon of self-portraiture. In 2004, Quinn’s sculpture of a pregnant Alison Lapper—whose congenital condition phocomelia left her no arms and with shortened legs—won the prestigious Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square.