I make sculptures of bodily and psychic disintegration, deterioration and reconstitution in which the process of using fragments to create figurative forms is as important as the final product. I make my pieces using alginate molds taken directly from the body (usually my own), body parts are cut apart and reassembled, or collaged, together to create a new form. Both the process and the final product thus simultaneously reproduce and contain bodily and artistic fragmentation. Culturally, I understand my work to be engaging with the long tradition of bronze sculpture based on the body, particularly the tradition of Ancient Greece. As sculptures of fragmentary bodies, my pieces reference the remains of ancient Greek sculptures that time, weather and war have eroded into remains, and in this way also comment upon the interpretive and reconstructive process of viewing incomplete and degraded pieces of art. Indeed, they reconstruct the figure, or parts of the figure, much as the f
riezes of the temples of ancient Greece have been reconstructed for viewers’ consumption from found and damaged fragments. In these friezes, as in my work, space is defined by remnants: the original creation has been transformed. Theoretically, I see myself responding to Freudian theories of the body, psychoanalytic ideas about the self and its soma, much of which Freud himself developed from his readings of Ancient Greek myths as well. In short, just as psychoanalytic thought takes the self apart and reconstitutes it as a new form, so my work uses bronze textural and formal reconstructions to examine the body’s paradoxical fragility and strength.
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