Fragments
part of Hang 10, at CC Gears, April 2016
group Bachelor of Fine Arts final exhibition
Artist’s Statement
The fragments are a self-portrait, an interpretation of my history and a solidification of my story. The figure is the essence of what is human – a physically definitive entity. The skins are three-dimensional drawings, my perception of the figure. When drawing the body, the interpretation should be honest, frank and visceral. The figure in art is the drawer’s personal impression of that essence. The human, bare and uncovered is susceptible, warm, and intrinsically familiar – yet not one is completely alike to another. The body is flawed and imperfect; it is organic and tender. The flesh is easily scarred, its composition malleable and ever-changing. It ages and perishes, grows and shrinks.
In defiance to art history and its heritage of work through the ages, I’m compelled to draw upon the female form, and an intentionally un-idealized figure. The incongruity and deeply-rooted tradition of the male artist and male subject begs to be questioned, as well as the tradition of the female form in art used solely as a subject of the “male gaze.” She needs to be raw, pure and true to herself and her ideas of what feels strong. I feel a need for her to be contemplative and reflective. My model is not an “ideal” woman as contemporary art history describes, she is real and egalitarian.
The connectedness I feel to my fragments is inherent, as if the bodies are my own. Beyond the personal souls and stories I’ve given the skins, their existence to me feeling as if they were born of my very breath are multi-faceted. The ephemerality of my paper-fiber material harkening to the temporal nature of the body; the disjointed and fragmented sculpture re-contextualizing history’s ideas of ruins; even the physical act of pulling a cast off of a person is intimate in itself, connected. We are all a delicately composed bag of flesh housing water, minerals, and organic matter. It is vulnerable, and it is beautiful.