ScULPTURE, 2017-2019
I began using modeling clay to make sculptures as props or “erotic specimens” to draw. I am interested in how natural history museums preserve and display objects for study, and how these displays can inadvertently fetishize the natural world. My range of processes and materials expanded in 2019 when I was an Artist-in-Residence in the Arts/Industry Program, administered by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. In the Kohler foundry, I translated images from nature into cast iron and brass sculptures that served as metaphors for human corporeal experience. The delicate leg of a dead bird was enlarged dramatically and re-contextualized with a statuary base in Trophy: a monument that commemorates our mortality, the passage of time and memory. Small-scale natural objects are fetishized and eroticized, and reenvisaged for the purpose of seduction.
