Sculpture

works in bronze, clay, wood, stone, mixed media

Navigating Memory / Re-membering the Map (Bronze Cast, exhibited at the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, August 15 – October 17, 2021)

Breastplate Memory Map I (Bronze)

Breastplate Memory Map II (Bronze)

TransMigrations – Mar & Terra (Bronze)

Ark/Archive – Self-portrait with Barc, Bird, Coin, Compass, Fish, Scars, Trajectories Retraced

Woman & her nets (metal & wire armature, rope and cured polymer clay, mounted on aspen and walnut)

Hollowed/Hallowed Woman: Prospecting or Portait of the Sculptor as an Old Woman (Bronze mounted on painted wood & stone, single lost wax bronze casts) (1992, exhibited alongside Ukrainian sketches &from 1991-1992 at the Hart Gallery, 2022)

Home, Ukraine, 1992-2022 (mixed media sculpture, with cured metal & polymer clay figures, bronze patina, welded steel frameworks, ripped and charred documentary photographs from Ukraineinstalled in juxtaposition with documentary photographs of family life in Ukraine and political speaches, 1991-1992)

Boy Piling Stones at the Sea’s Edge (wire & metal armature, cured polymer clay with bronze finish & patina, small stones, mounted on stone)

Monstrous Memory – Boy Fishing (bronze cast & original study – wire & metal armature, stones, cured polymer clay with bronze finish, blue patina)

Boy bathing, found objects, wire & metal armature, cured polymer clay, prior to applying bronze finish

Work in progress

Transatlantic Fishing (works in progress, with fragments found on the Vicentine Coast and Cape Cod)

My bronzes and composite sculptures are rarely finished. Retrospective, they are also prospective, a way of seeking and seeing and making sense across time and space, with salvaged, continually reworked stuff. The lost wax bronze casting process is long, and like life full of losses, vision and revision. My composite sculptures, interpolating found fragments and made forms, are likewise pieces that I return to and refine over long periods of time. Reflecting trajectories taken, my work is also sometimes reflexive, about its own making. I hope my composite sculptures work in ways Russian formalists imagined art might, instigating attentiveness and understanding of both life and art through strange reframing, reconfiguring, recycling, reimagining.

Bronze solidifies traces, makes flesh and salvaged fragments less fragile, but it also can show the imprint of time on those things, the slight pressing into clay or wax, the scar, the suture. It bears traces of its own contingency or fragility in flashing that I sometimes find wondrous. I take ages to chase and add patinas to my cast bronzes. I even more often rework my more recent compositions and curated installations in welded metal frames. Any finished piece for me remains provisional.

Here is a glimpse of the process:

Above is the initial wax study for Mapping Cultural Memory/Re-membering the Map (a revisionary portulan map, with intentionally ruptured and rerouted lines, recalling continental and transatlantic crossings, fleshing out continental traumas in female form, while also retracing trajectories taken by my itinerant, immigrant great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mother, myself, among others. I includemy grandmother’s fish earings as traces of my own family’s trajectories; Portuguese coins from 1974, partly drowned in wax standing in for caravels & compass).

 

The wax is surrounded by tar paper reinforced by clay to make a detailed silicone mold, backed by a plaster mother mold. (In this case the two-tone wax study was salvaged, then reworked to include more detail and eliminate cutbacks in order to make a plaster mold for paper casting, to experiment with making handmade paper relief maps that I can cut into and draw on). By pouring melted wax into the silicone mold, I made several replicas of the original, now with the uniform color of a single wax more closely approximating the effect of bronze casting. I then reworked these replicas, adding and subtracting masses, fleshing out alternative figures and creatures, redrawing lines, disrupting lines and developing gaps (like memory gaps, distances, disturbances). In the end, I carved most of the sea out of the wax relief that I chose to cast in bronze, using rope and dowels to support the Portulan lines used for navigation before longitude and lattitude became standard mapping lines. Likewise, in mappings using casts of my own face and breastplate as substrates (represented below during the process of gating, venting and preparing for slurry), what is cut away is as critical as what is added in the recasting of individual and cultural memory.

For the map, the invested piece was hoisted with the assistance of friends and pulleys and metal pipes and rolled into a kiln much larger than the one above (in which a small mask is being burned out), then burned out slowly for a couple days before the pouring of fifty pounds of molten bronze.

After the bronze pour, it is a matter of working with ax and chisel to cut through the investment with its tar paper and chicken wire support.

In the images below, I am cleaning bronzes near the end of the process of releasing them from the investment. The gates and vents are still attached.

The gates and vents are then cut and chiseled off (using power saws, dremmel tools, hammer and cold chisel), various parts welded and reworked, and the bronze sand blasted before the process of applying chemicals for patinas begins.