When Gabriel Vinas was 5 years old, he used to stare at people.
"You know, in elementary school, I have these kind of vivid memories of just looking at someone and kind of like seeing this person that's seen a lot more than I," said Vinas.
He and his mother had emigrated from Cuba to Miami, and Vinas didn't speak much English yet. So instead of talking to the people he stared at, he would draw them. They didn't seem to mind.
"Most of the time if there is this kid that's drawing you, you're like, 'OK, this is fine,'" Vinas said.
As early as elementary school, Gabriel remembers having a distinct sense that great art was something to be revered. At home, his mom would show him art books. She loved Michelangelo and Van Gogh. And as he got older, he kept staring at people and he kept drawing them.
"In high school, I would take a train that was about 30 minutes. So it became like an exercise where I'll take my sketchbook out, and I'll do a portrait," he said.
He started showing these drawings to his mom and to his teachers and he could tell they were impressed. But more than that, Vinas started to notice the looks on the faces of his subjects when he showed them his sketches and he began to realize these were more than just drawings.
"The portrait is this very powerful, very emotionally charged subject where this is like an act of remembering an act of honoring someone," he said.
In high school, Vinas tried to enroll in a figure-painting class, but it was full. He ended up in an entry-level ceramics class.
"I was not excited about that at all," he said. I was like, 'Oh, great, this is gonna be a waste of time.' Little did I know right, what, what the future held in store for me. But, I didn't want to be caught dead throwing a pot."
So he didn't. He decided to see if he could do the same thing with clay that he did with his pencil, make a human form. He tried making a head, and much to his surprise, he loved it. Before he knew it, two and a half hours had passed.
"And then I just wanted to do it all the time," Vinas said. "When I got home, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I didn't want to turn on the video games or anything like that, I just wanted to sculpt."
He started asking classmates to model for him and making portraits of them out of clay.
"If the person was comfortable enough, it was like someone I knew I would like, wanna, like, feel the curvature of their cheek. I would kind of feel how the skin would feel on my fingers and then touch the sculpture."
When I got home, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I didn't want to turn on the video games or anything like that, I just wanted to sculpt.Gabriel Vinas
If the portraits in his sketchbook felt like something more than just drawings, sculpting felt like more than just portraiture, something almost sacred.
"There was this purity and familiarity. I could have my hands right on the piece and it feels very personal, very intimate. And I felt like I was connecting more, not just with the work, but also with the person. And it just felt more like I was creating something like maybe you can throw in some weird God complex in there as well, where you like, you're creating something out of mud, you know, that kind of creation myths that a lot of cultures have about coming from the dirt," said Vinas. "There might be something of that in there, but there was just something where it felt more like magic than drawing did for me. I never really painted or drew anything of note again."
After high school, Vinas went to the College of Creative Studies in Detroit. And when he graduated, he got a job doing technical modeling at Ford. The money was good, but something was missing.
"I just couldn't see myself only doing automotive stuff, indefinitely. And then I'm like 65 and I have all the things, but it wasn't really what I guess would feed my human need to make objects."
So at night, when he got home, Vinas would sculpt for hours. He started posting his work on Instagram. And one night he got a message from a scientist in Australia named Ryan Campbell.
Campbell was studying biological anthropology and he was fascinated by Vinas' work with human forms. They started talking, and their conversations led to an experiment. If Gabriel could use clay to sculpt lifelike recreations of human beings, could he do the same with human ancestors?
Campbell started sending Vinas molds of ancient biological specimens, like the tong child, the fossilized skull of an early biped some 3 million years old.
As he began working with these molds, Vinas thought back to those early revelations from his sketchbook days and it occurred to him that making a sculpture of the tong child was an opportunity to present this fossil as something more than a scientific relic.
"Almost elevating their status as not just these specimens to be prodded and analyzed coldly, but just this like act of remembrance that this was someone's child," Vinas said.
As Vinas began his collaboration with Campbell, he also started reading the works of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson.
"And they talked about the scientific worldview as more than just like this cold thing, more like this could be like a spiritual thing where there's like this poetry of reality where we are connected by the story of biology," he said. "And then, that really captured my interest, because what I was trying to do before was, kind of, capture this little moment of connection between me and this total stranger."
What if — Gabriel began to wonder — sculpture could make these ancient beings seem less strange?
"That connection that I had years ago on trains and buses, I'm trying to recapture this with this, a noble person from millennia ago," he said. "It's almost like we don't get as excited as like your evangelical Christian would get excited about, you know, the ecstasy of St. Teresa, right? Something that we need like this kind of grandiose art object. I was starting to ask a question like, 'If this is true that we are all biologically related and we have this sea of ancient beings that are either related to us or tangentially related to us, why don't we hold them in such an esteem, so as to make objects of reverence?'"
Eventually, Vinas realized he couldn't stay at Ford. So, he left and he got his master of fine arts degree at Arizona State University.
Not long ago, he got a commission to build a sculpture at a medieval church in Italy. He decided to make his own twist on the Pietà, the classic marble religious sculpture showing Jesus laying in Mary's arms.
Vinas' version is also cast in marble, but the figures are apes with their faces veiled. From a distance, it looks similar to the original. It's only when you get up close that you can make out the apes' facial features under the sculpted fabric.
While he was working on it, a woman who worked at the hotel where he was staying, started coming by the studio to watch him. They didn't talk much, she didn't speak English and Vinas didn't really speak Italian. He suspected she was Catholic, and at first he was worried that she would be offended by the sculpture. But, as he studied the look on her face, he realized she was actually moved by it.
"Even though it's not like the way that she views the world, she understands that I'm trying to connect," he said.
The woman came by twice a week to check on Vina' progress. When he finished it, he gave her a miniature version of the sculpture, which she keeps in the hotel lobby.
"We're all little enigmas to each other. We're all little like mysteries, doing the portrait of someone, in clay. You're kind of trying to chip away and trying to capture something," Vinas said. "You're always gonna miss something, but you're still making an attempt to make contact with either the world or the person that's in front of you. That's what I wanna do with this work."
