Evan Morse creates sculptures that reference ancient styles while addressing modern themes. Overthrown, 2021, patinated plaster, 27 x 39 x 2 in. All images courtesy of Evan Morse.

Visual Arts

Modern Classics

Sculptor Evan Morse uses ancient, timeless styles to comment on—and poke fun at—contemporary society

When ancient Greeks or Romans worked out, they didn’t hit the showers to freshen up; instead, they grabbed a strigil—a long, curved blade—and scraped off the dirt and sweat.

The habit was so widespread it inspired a host of votive sculptures, Apoxyomenos, the Scraper. Each statue showed a naked male athlete—rippled muscles and distant gaze—scouring the film from his skin. The most famous was carved by Lysippos in the fourth century BCE.

In his 2020 take on the Scraper, award-winning sculptor Evan Morse, whose work puts a modern twist on classical art, replaced the strigil with a more contemporary tool: stick deodorant.

The painted polychrome plaster Athlete with Deodorant shows a nude male in the timeless pose of Apoxyomenos—but with a blue towel tossed behind him and a bright red Old Spice Original in hand. The statue was modeled on a friend who qualified for the US Olympic marathon trials.

“In a lot of my work, I’m thinking about how humans are inherently the same as we have been across time—just little aspects of our culture have changed,” says Morse (’15).

Athlete with Deodorant is part of Morse’s Idols series, which also includes a relief of a nude woman walking a robot dog, a statue of a man wearing a cow-patterned onesie, a bust flossing its teeth, and a marble icon stuffing a burrito in his mouth. Morse works mostly in clay, plaster, and stone, using ancient styles and techniques to highlight present-day themes. Based in Newton, Mass., he also sculpts—in nonpandemic times, at least—in studios in Carrara, Italy, and West Rutland, Vt.

“There’s usually a little humor in my work,” says Morse. “It’s important for me to have fun. But as I’ve been doing more political work—and it’s hard not to be more political at this stage—it’s hard to balance that out, because some of it can be so negative.”

On one side of 2020’s Sacrificial Altar for Plastic Water Bottles, a relief shows a woman filling a bottle at a public spring: her jeans and sneakers set in contrast to the antique goddess figure perched on the fountain’s plinth. The 19-inch-high piece, made from terra-cotta, was inspired by a water fountain Morse saw in Lucca, Italy, and the empty bottles littering his neighborhood and the politics of clean drinking water.

“I was thinking about offerings to the gods and the marks we leave, our legacy,” says Morse. The altar is part of a series incorporating found objects that includes reliquaries for dog fur, food packages, even toenail clippers. “I’m also making the sculpture more of a functional object than just a purely aesthetic thing.”

Morse and his wife, Taylor Apostol (’15)—also a sculptor—recently launched Goathouse Studio, a website and business to promote their commissioned work: their latest is a marble portrait bust of author and poet Julia C. R. Dorr for Rutland, Vt. But practicality doesn’t always top his agenda.

“I’m not thinking, ‘What’s the work I can make that’s going to sell?’” says Morse, whose art is largely supported by grants. “I’m thinking about the best work I can make.”

While some of his peers use computer-aided milling, Morse does everything by hand; each sculpture takes months. “I find the reductive aspect of stone carving appealing. There’s the resistance from the stone. I like the traditional methods of working.”

The only technology involved is the camera he uses to capture inspiration for future work—sometimes he’ll also turn to photo editing software to combine images.

Like the plastic bottle altar, Umbrella Saint was also sparked by a photograph Morse took in Italy. Hewn from marble, the sculpture looks like it’s been torn from the walls of a medieval European cathedral: a stoic male standing in a half-domed niche, the hint of a smile on his lips. And yet this pious character isn’t wearing robes, but a hoodie; isn’t holding a cross, but umbrellas.

“The central figure was inspired by these immigrant street sellers. The guy that I photographed was from Senegal, so it’s about this immigrant who is legally there, but still only on the fringe, still an outsider,” says Morse, who paid the seller for his time, keeping in contact to share images of the 2017 statue, which is part of his Idols series. “I was putting this outsider figure—who’s now Italian—into the context of this Renaissance-style architectural niche. Saints always have their token items, and I was seeing these guys standing like statues with their token items like umbrellas or lighters.”

With the pandemic limiting his opportunities to explore Europe, particularly its historic cities laced with public art and sculpture, inspiration for more recent pieces has come closer to home. Overthrown, a 2021 relief in patinated plaster, shows a parent tumbling from a couch, kids clambering around, toys littering the floor. The models were his brother-in-law and nephew.

“I started with the idea of that tragic hero,” says Morse, who admits the piece also captures his own feelings on parenthood. “But then I was thinking about making it more indicative of the general anxiety of the past year—people locked in their houses all day, trying to work and manage the kids at the same time.”