ABOUT THE ARTIST

Exquisite Corpse

My drawings and sculptures utilize the figure to explore gender, social roles and cultural perceptions.  The figures reference folk tale and common literary and visual metaphors as a means to provide context and delve into our collective experience.  

The Exquisite Corpse figurines are slip cast from molds taken from both figures I have sculpted and found objects I have selected.  The figures are divided into a head, middle, and bottom and cast many times.  Each part can be used in many different combinations.  Each new arrangement dictates a very different content.  Though the individual sections are predetermined and limited, how they are put together are not.  

We constantly adapt to our surroundings.  We try on roles and ideas and decide whether to incorporate or discard them.  The Exquisite Corpse series searches out influences in the hope of coming to some understanding of human nature.  It jumbles and reconfigures elements from the domestic and animal worlds, exploring assumptions and stereotypes and addressing some of the incongruities that exist.  

The inspiration for the Exquisite Corpse series came from designing the tiles for a women’s washroom at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.  Part of the washroom depicts figures based on the Surrealist parlor game called Exquisite Corpse. In this game several artists complete a drawing of a figure without knowing what the others have created.  This is possible because a piece of paper is folded into several sections, and each artist only can see their section when they draw.  For the Women's Room, I created 10 figures made of three tiles each; a top, middle, and bottom.  We made molds of the original thirty tiles and then cast about 25 of each.  Hundreds of new figures were created by varying which three tiles made up each figure.  The possibilities became limitless, especially with the added variations of hand painting each tile.  Though the individual sections were predetermined and limited, how they were put together are not.  I found the element of chance attractive after working for years with a clear idea of how a piece would look from the start.  It occurred to me that I could do the same thing with sculptures.  Casting would allow me to try many new variations on a piece, be more playful and allow the element of chance to reappear in my work.