This piece was never meant to be a statement. It’s more of a threshold — a quiet place between one life and another. The First Passage was born from a deeply personal space, where outer circumstance and inner reckoning converged.

On one level, it speaks to my departure from Cuba — the physical act of crossing, of leaving behind the known, the rooted, the inherited. But the sculpture isn’t merely about escape. It’s about the disorientation that follows, that long pause suspended between lands, between selves.

Liminality — that’s the word that lives at the core of this work. The architecture of it feels open and unfinished, almost hesitant. And that’s intentional. It reflects that space where identity hasn’t yet reassembled, where something is both breaking and forming.

But this passage wasn’t just geographic. It also marked the beginning of an inner journey — the quiet unfolding of spiritual life, which arrived not as an answer but as a question carried across many waters. I didn’t fully know what I was seeking, only that the old coordinates no longer served me.

In this sculpture, you’ll see that tension — the pull between heaviness and release, grounded form and directional movement. There’s stillness here, but also momentum. It’s a visual meditation on what it means to leave, to search, to become.

I share this not to define what the piece should mean to anyone else, but to offer the compass it came from. If it resonates, perhaps it’s because you, too, have stood at a crossing, uncertain but compelled forward. In that sense, this work is less mine than it is a shared gesture — an offering across thresholds.

— Timur

-The First Passage-

Wood,brass,

fabric,human hair,animal fat,fire.

14”x8”x7”