VARIOUS BODIES OF WORK: AN OVERVIEW
The majority of my career I worked as a sculptor focused upon the human body and elements close to it. For a long-time human hair was a recurring material for sculpture and installation. In the groundbreaking 1994 show “Bad Girls West” I used giant balls of human hair dangling from a peg on the wall to evoke both automobile ornaments swinging from the rear-view mirror and, not unrelatedly, testicles exposed to the world.
Shoes have also been an ongoing love affair initially as sculpture and more recently as drawings. The sculptures are crafted in aqua resin, wire and wood, elaborately colored, painted, coiled, primped and polished, these are shoes that push fetish, ornament and commodity to the extreme. The sense is that they search out the improbable bodies that might wear them. The shoe drawings continue in the same vein melding elements from nature suggesting fantasy and the hope in transformation.
Boom! A room size installation of wax castings explodes across a wall of shelves. Each of the shelves filled with different sized explosions; mushroom clouds built out of everyday objects, one on top of another. Objects collected along life’s path, objects that called to me from their dusty shelf in an antiquarian shop, and objects from all over the house, even the refrigerator. Each sculpture a place holder or representation of different “booms” big and small, expected or not that exploded in my everyday life.
Domestic ruins, or fragments of home life stray a little, but not too far from the body. Through casting and mold making procedures I recorded the day-to-day experience of the home. I cast the books around me, the table one sits at to read the books, the vase that sits upon the table and the radiator that warms the room. The pieces hold fast the domestic life that rumbles by as we live it. They seize upon personal history; they are embalmed memories captured by casting. It is a mental landscape of home through the objects that hold me as I hold them. In fact, it turns out that the straying from the body is toward its interior: the body and its immediate world as a place of memory and puzzling reverie.