Maquettes
This series asks how one makes a place - or finds a place - in the world. How can we belong? To our institutions, spaces, families and each other.
My exploration answers through figurative work, part abstraction, part architectural and archeological investigation, part research into modernist pedestals and also museum display strategies for relics/ruins/fragments.
The work centers the figures of cats and birds. These are not pets, but the stray cats and the wild birds who might visit our yards. They are familiars, and they both do and do not have a solid home-place. They both belong and do not belong somewhere. And they’ve come through all of this somewhat ragged, barely more than a blob, a squish of clay or metal. Like earlier work, these figurines/blobs serve as a sites of psychological projection and stand-ins for people. They display an unresponsive kind of being at the end of the world. They are also all palm of the hand-sized, an intimate scale. A size and shape which asks for care, but cannot receive it.
The structures, for these creatures are miniature monuments, propositions for future giant instantiations. So they are holding lots of bothnesses, monumental & miniature, important & unnamed, brand new & historical, materially refined & bluntly executed.
Across elemental materials - bronze, ceramic, iron and occasionally milk paint - this series of small sculptures offer possibilities for belonging when times, our homes /institutions/ situationships/ country/ temples/ churches/ neighborhoods are unstable. The figures both do and do not have rooms of their own.
The answers to belonging in a bareboned world are formal ones with references to art history (Trajan's Column, Brancusi etc.), and Architecture (Saarinan modernism, The Church’s steeple) and also traditional museum displays of relics and other fragments of history. Some structures are rigid, while others have collapsed or are about to. These pieces are earthy answers - with the weighty (actual and symbolic) materials chosen, and also the colors, rusty reds, navy blues, warm greys, greens and a tender pink and cream color here and there.
The work does not think everything will be ok. They do, however, think some things will last however bareboned.