In this past semester I have attempted to expand my current theme of identity from painting and drawing to sculpture. I already had a love of wire working, so I embarked on a series of figural works created out of chicken wire. I had a number of failures, at one point I even tried to paper mache over the chicken wire. Needless to say, that looked terrible. Chicken wire is such a strange material: not quite sturdy, yet not quite fluid, nearly transparent from a distant, and incapable of picking up in subtleties in the form. It was proving difficult.
Ultimately, instead of covering the sculptures I decided to fill them. My first is a female form filled with scraps of crumpled, flesh-toned paper. My intention for this piece was to be able to capture what makes a person a person: on each piece of paper is a moment or memory from the past that helped to create the person that we are now. I say we because I soon realized that if I was to fill this sculpture myself it would take months, maybe all year. And so I invited a group of my close friends and gave everyone a piece of paper and a pen, and let them have it. It was actually quite a beautiful experience. This sculpture contains the good, the bad, and the ugly of the people I love: the process of creating this piece was incredibly therapeutic and really allowed us to let go.
The male figure in turn is filled with flags from Pato Hebert’s exhibition And Also With You. There are two different colored flags, the blue represent a time of peace, and the orange represent a time of frustration. I used the left over flags and adapted them to project: less about the ying and yang of life, and more about all of the wonderful and terrible things that fuse to create people. I wanted him shown on his back, with flags protruding out of him, much more violent then the female figure, more defeated
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