INTERIOR FRAGMENTS 

In earlier work I focused upon the 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. Hand crafted in wire or aqua resin and, 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. 

Currently I have strayed a little, but no too far, from the body. In the most recent work I am interested in domestic ruins, or fragments of home life. Through casting and mold making procedures I record 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. 

Casting is usually an indexical sign: no space between sign and referent. However I tend often to divert or subvert the mold making process. Rather than mold an object and produce serial copies I have come to a place where I make molds and present those as the unique object, a negative echo of the original. Or, variously, I make a mold and produce a single cast of the object in the same material the mold is made from. It sort of is, and isn’t, the original. In the current body of work the iridescent aqua blue silicone mold making material further distances and adds a sense of estrangement or “otherness” from the original. In a way, rather than copies the pieces become caricatures of the originals. 

Thus casting and mold making are used to make permanent the otherwise fleeting experience of the domestic scene. In the current work you might see the elaborate tracery of Victorian fireplace mantles sharing space with mid-century modern art glass and the utilitarian central heating of 1920s vintage. 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.