Abstract | Artist Statement | Image Gallery | Home| Close Portfolio (and return to SMP index) Artist StatementKatherine Cooper
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Much of our human experience is based upon a negation of the bodily:
a desire to erase markers of age and attributes of our physicality that
are beyond our control. We don't like to think of ourselves as being merely
animals, subject to the same repeated processes of generation, reproduction
and death inherent to all bodies. The traditional idea of sculpture as
monumental is an expression of this desire to negate the body. Monumentality
is defined as "having the quality of being larger than life."
(Webster's Dictionary) It also implies permanence; something that is immutable
and unchanging. My work addresses this impossibility; as much as we may
toil nothing is larger than life itself, we cannot outlive our bodies,
nor can we bypass the processes of generation, reproduction, and maturation
inherent in all life forms. The generation that is part of my process
becomes the subject of my work as the act of creation in making art mimics
the flux of birth and death. The materials that I use allude to the human
body and amplify the notion of impermanence that is ultimately connected
with any form of life. By using neutral pliable materials such as unbleached
paper and muslin and structuring the work using simple armatures of wire
and welded steel, I hope to express the idea of generation, an idea that
is both central to my process and the content of my work. Generation as a universal process implies repetition and newness, but
also death and impermanence. This cycle of growth is predictable, it is
the given of any form of life; what lives will die and what exists will
attempt to perpetuate itself. The same is true in much of my work, the
presence of one form yields more of the same kind of form. Thus, my process
of making sculpture is metaphoric for the constant accumulation and selection
of generative cycles. The proliferation of life as implied by generation
is also present in the images create by the objects in my work. Often
in one of my sculptures a given physical form is repeated with only slight
variations, and these parts are then recombined to make a new, supple
reference to the body, often recombining as a field of organic forms.
In these works, the state of coming into existence, of creation or birth,
is more important than permanence of the thing itself, which is impossible
for something living. Their soft and supple materiality heightens this
feeling of impermanence, contrary to the main goal of a monument which
is timelessness. My sculptures are part of the flux of time. They participate
in the effects of time rather than attempting to defy them. When making
work, the time necessary to create an object also becomes important, similarly
imitating a sort of germination and development of a living thing. This
idea of development and growth in my work is present throughout all of
its facets. The process of making work yields new life forms of sorts,
sculptural objects that reference generation on an imagistic and compositional
level, while materially my work utilizes soft means of articulating form
as recognition of the transience of life. My use of materials supports my belief that art making should embrace
generative processes. While traditional monumental sculpture aims to manipulate
rigid materials in ways that contradict their inherent materiality, my
use of such malleable materials as paper and fabric mimics the supple,
impermanent nature of the body. In my piece, Untitled, from the fall semester,
I used off-white muslin to create tapered forms which were then bound
together using wire coated in plastic. The forms were obviously physically
independent of one another, but their upright position was possible only
because many soft forms were joined to make a single entity. Their binding
together allowed for an autonomous object to exist rather than disparate
parts, while the bulging created by the cinching of the wire was further
evidence of the forms' soft texture and composition. An artist similarly
engaged with the inherent structural qualities of their materials is Eva
Hesse. In her work, Untitled Hesse allowed gravity's effect on rope dipped
in latex to dictate the draping, tangled quality of the piece, which was
preserved when the latex hardened. This way of allowing the physical properties
of a material to act as subject matter is an important attribute of both
Hesse's work and my own. In addition to my use of materials, my work also references bodily generation
on an imagistic level. Often these images are obviously bodily, but the
exact part with which they correlate with is impossible to discern. In
my installed sculpture, Divine Travelling Mercy, also made of muslin,
two large tapered limb-like forms suggest the appendages of humans or
animals, and seem to give birth, eat, or expel smaller bundles, sewn in
such a way as to seem to have three nipples, udder-like and protruding.
This ambiguity, requiring the viewer to create constant associations,
is part of the dynamic tension of my work; it is so many things, and yet
nothing at once. Sculptor Louise Bourgeois engages similar bodily references
in her work, though perhaps less ambiguous, they often explicitly suggest
a sexualized body part, but place it in a mysterious context, or repeat
it with a frequency that robs it of a more threatening quality, rendering
it absurd. In Chapiteau, 1968, Bourgeois creates a conglomeration of repeated
protrusions in plaster, creating a field that makes the viewer squirm
with the tension created by asking, "is that what I think it is?"
Though neither Bourgeois' works nor my own move, both seem to be in flux,
either multiplying, being born anew, or engaging in some action inherent
to their "life." Bourgeois's use of a multiplicity of forms
combined creates "allusions to plant life (which) usually stress
the germinating, bulbous, budding nature of plants and flowers, that is
to say everything entailing proliferation and sprouting." (Crone,
28) The bulbous qualities of many of the forms present in my work are
similar to those in Bourgeois's work, but mine are much more ambiguous,
suggesting appendages of any kind, human, animal or plant, while Bourgeois's
are more suggestive of specific human sex organs or limbs. There is a
certain power that can be derived from re-creating abandoned or lost limbs;
the visceral reaction inspired by viewing a dismembered part, even a suggestion
of one, is automatic. I often make images in my work that suggest not only the body, but its
housing, or our domestic space. Often the same form that alludes to a
limb or finger can also be seen to resemble such objects as bundles, pillow-cases,
or hats. In Yellow, an earlier work from 2002, muslin packages were bound
with twine and allowed to hang together with some spilling out from the
collective whole, suspended by their twine wrapping. These forms were
evocative of bundles of any kind, as what they enclosed was not visible
from the outside, inspiring a feeling of protectiveness that promotes
a desire to wrap something. The accumulation of these forms is suggestive
of a place where objects are compiled and stored, a domestic space, or
a place designated by humans as both a shelter and a storehouse of the
objects of our lives. Installation artist Ann Hamilton employs accumulation
as a means of creating a larger field, evoking both the small gesture
repeated innumerably, and the vastness of such an endeavor. Her piece
the lids of unknown position, featured a wall entirely covered with mussel
shells as a natural and yet rigid and regular form. This wall suggested
the individual parts, the mussel shells, and the wholeness created by
Hamilton's act of combining them. Of her process Hamilton said, "How
things are made becomes, in a very literal sense, their meaning,"
My use of repeated forms makes the way in which things are combined the
very nature of the work; like Hamilton, often the making and unmaking
of something becomes the subject matter. As an installation artist, Hamilton's
work exists on a literal level in many venues. The house in which she
installed still life was someone's home, but this is less important than
the fact that the means she used to create the installation were evocative
of woman's traditional role within domestic space. This particular work
featured a tender facing countless men's shirts that had been singed and
gilded. Hamilton's references to domesticity are generally more specific,
while mine suggest domestic space as a mundane place for our bodies during
our fleeting and transitory lives. Domestic space as shelter or lair, as container for our physical selves
is rife with objects that make our required comfort possible, whether
by imparting something so essential as warmth or by serving as a sentimental
reminder of a past experience or time. Sewing as a way of constructing
form evokes ideas of traditional domesticity as a practice that is employed
in the home. While the repeated images in my work allude to the physical
body, they also depend upon ideas of the body as a functioning system,
one that heals itself, reproduces, grows and dies. The action of sewing
physically joins the fabric in a way that suggests healing. Sewing as
a practice both produces-yields-some form, reproduces from a pattern or
pre-existing form, and mends or heals disjoined parts of a whole. Sewing
is physically essential to the structure of my works, but it also operates
as a metaphor for rapid growth by joining, or renewal of life through
healing. This practice of sewing is one of the ways that my process becomes
part of a continual reference to growth and generation. Often the unified whole that is one of my works is made possible by the
conglomeration of an accumulation of parts, visible in Divine Travelling
Mercy as well as Define Anxiety, where many repeated forms combine to
make a whole. In Blind Man's Buff, 1960, Bourgeois utilizes repeated phallic
forms to suggest growth, mutation and generation. (Bernadac, 106) For
both Bourgeois and myself, these disparate parts are reassembled in a
quest for wholeness, but the wholeness each of us creates is more about
our own versions of reassembling than actual healing or restoring to an
original "natural" state. The formation of these "parts,"
my process of making, is metaphoric for the generative body processes
that are visually referenced in my work. My labor of creating is similar
to the multiplication inherent in birth. The way I compose the products
of my generative process further displays this idea of growth; repeated
forms are necessary to make a whole, almost representative of a species. The accumulation of parts that happens in my process of making work mimics
the patterns of growth inherent in all species of life. The way that I
then compose these forms is about an idea of cyclical coming into being
in that the single unit is less important than its existence as one of
many, just as life cannot continue with only one member of a species.
Our inability to comprehend the chaos that is growth and generation is
often tempered by imposing mathematical schema upon these seemingly nebulous
phenomena. In my companion works, Blunt and Tapered, the irregular rectangular
and conical shapes are subjected to a grid in an attempt to both order
and isolate these unwieldy forms that would otherwise collapse into one
indistinguishable mass. Does the use of a grid have anything to do with
nature or is it merely a device created by man to help us to conceptualize
what happens in nature? I believe the former. I think that natural phenomena
are dictated by very specific patterns, making a grid both an appropriate
means of organizing organic form and a possible subject as a feature of
nature itself. Eva Hesse utilized the grid as a subject unto itself. In
Schema, Hesse's half-globes, slightly irregular on an individual level,
are rigidly fixed in their place within the grid that she imposes upon
them. The forms themselves are no less "natural" because of
this imposition; on the contrary, this introduction of pattern further
emphasizes the bodily processes that are the impetus for Hesse's work
and my own. My ritualized process of making work is complemented by the
grid; while the initial form is created intuitively, every other aspect
of the work I make is dictated by my self-imposed system of generation.
My works also express the physicality and generation possible by the
body in literal terms. The sculptures that I make result from my physical
labor of toiling to create new matter, however impossible. I create new
forms that relate to life, and also reference my labor in making them
and the generative possibilities of the human investment in making things.
A close examination of any of my works encourages questions of how the
objects were made, as well as making the viewer aware of their own relationship
to the works. Ann Hamilton's installations often feature an actual person,
designated as "tender" who is constantly making, altering and
transforming the viewer's experience of the work. The transformation in
my own work occurs before it is displayed. But for both our works, the
viewer experiences a self-consciousness; in my work one is especially
conscious of their own physicality, while in Hamilton's one is hyper-aware
of their participation in a discrete event. The ephemerality inherent
in installation art parallels the ephemerality suggested by both the materiality
of my works and the images they evoke: our ever-changing physical selves.
My work always engages a human scale, and often mimics the verticality
of human stature or is aligned with a viewer's sightline. Unlike common
statues, obelisks and pillars, these works do not dwarf but instead commune
with the viewer. In the past I have utilized the gallery wall as both
a support and a foil for the display of a particular piece which is a
technique I'm abandoning in favor of creating works that are spatially
independent. Thus, they may be related to as discrete objects, able to
be confronted like another person. They also become microscopic views
of generation amplified and made easier to visually comprehend and experience.
My work Untitled stands a mere two feet tall, but exists as an independent
object, present in a gallery context, but easy to imagine occupying the
same position in a different setting. Mario Merz's igloo are place-sensitive
installations which he creates using indigenous materials both natural
and manufactured, embrace the idea of "the abandonment of the gallery
wall as projecting or mural plane, and thus the idea to create a space
independent from the fact of hanging things on the wall…hence the
idea of the igloo as absolute space." (180) Like my own, Merz's works
are autonomous pieces, claiming their own space in the gallery. By engaging references to fecundity, maturation and maturity I hope to
provoke recognition of our natural physical processes as humans. I believe
knowledge of this will facilitate a reconciliation between our acculturated
selves and our natural environment. Joseph Beuys shared this desire to
bring bodies back into souls, to "transmute daily lives with spirituality."
Beuy's use of animals and natural materials hopes to reverse our distancing
as a species from our status as animals. (Borer, 15) Much of Beuys's oeuvre
was an attempt to imbue all aspects of life with art. In much of his work
Beuys utilizes intact natural materials, merely presenting them in a reconsidered
context to highlight their importance to our existence. His Chair with
Fat hinged upon the natural small-scale evolution of the fat from solid
and new to liquid and deteriorating. Beuys commented rather literally
upon humans' distancing from animals in his action, I Like America and
America Likes Me, when he cohabited for a week with a coyote in a gallery
space. Beuys swaddled himself in felt and warded off the coyote at times
with a shepherd's staff, seemingly addressing the outmoding of even those
positions which facilitate an interaction with animals. Despite my desire to promote consideration of the body in my final work, be it animal or human, often these bodily sculpture result from an intuitive process of transforming fabric through sewing, and result less because of a didactic desire and more because of a sheer need to create objects. My gradual moving towards creating solely full-round sculpture is a result of my enthusiasm for the possibility of creating new matter, an impossible task, nonetheless, one that I endeavor upon, at least metaphorically. These works defy traditional ideas of monumentality in their softness, human scale, lack of representational elements, and impermanence and yet I feel that the images they convey are worth recognizing as the only true universal, our physical bodies. Thus, the recognition implicit in such forms is a kind of new monumentality, a homage to human nature. Bibliography Arte Povera in collezione. Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2000 Bernadac, Marie Laure. Louise Bourgeois. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Borer, Alain. The Essential Joseph Beuys. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
MIT Christov-Bakargiev, Christine, ed. Arte Povera. London: Phaidon Press Ray, Gene, ed. Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy. New York, Distributed
Sussman, Elizabeth, ed. Eva Hesse. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002.
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