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With Wings
Sculpture
2023
Materials: unfired red clay, unfired white clay
Wien
Project Description
These sculptures represent the fragility of organisms in human made spaces, their death supporting our architecture of living. Using two different kinds of local dutch clay which are incompatible to each-other, the forms slowly break down over time revealing the hidden layers within.
Depicting this passage of decay, the forms reference the involuntary destruction of the human species in the built environment and the multiple timescales that these processes engage, proposing other ways to relate and connect to the transformation of another living being.
I started these sculptures when I began finding dead birds in my backyard. This happened repeatedly as they flew into windows, and I started burying them in the small garden I shared with my roommates.
The process of burying them, digging holes in the earth and placing them inside gave rise to the sculptural forms I began to construct. They are made of clay to reference the earth, their forms like wings, forelimbs of passage used to navigate other realms of being.
The sculptures were left unfired and slowly fall apart, representing the bones of the birds I first found.
Poem ‘With Wings’