Another related artist

To my mother's dismay I've always been a little interested in dead things and now my work might be drifting in the way of the decay.

Searching "animal carcass sculpture" I came up with John Morton. I am extremely interested in his work and am currently reading more about him.

Day 1 of constructions

research is fun

Here is one story I found to be interesting as the living chair. It took him over 20 years to sculpt a tree...

Above is from an exhibition by Roxanne Jackson, she seems to be similar to Simen Johan and I find her work to also be inspiring.


These are two pieces by Nick Ervinck and the closest stylistically to the pictures I have in my head of what I'd like my installation piece to look like. I'm going to try to manipulate bone in these ways as much as possible.



Another, and my favorite, sulking skeleton.


Another Roxanne Jackson, very appropriate.


Kris Kuksi is an American artist born in Missouri and raised in Kansas. His distaste for typical American life and pop culture show in his grotesque sculptures.



This underwater sculpture by Jason de Caires is another example of a relation to "life" and some sort of connection to what is natural. Frankly, it's amusing.


I also admire this spunky piece by Roxanne Jackson.


I drifted into the world of grotesque art and was drawn to Olivier de Sagazan's work. I also watched a few of his performance videos. I feel like he is trying to speak and express the agony of those who cannot. Some of his performances are fairly disturbing and gut wrenching.

More research

Here are more sulking skeletons. A taste of what's yet to come.


I found these images whild continuing to search slightly disturbing sculpture and hyperrealism of artists like Patricia Piccini and her piece The Embrace (below).
Above is the piece Unbearable Lightness by Tomas Gabzdil. It reminds me of a take on Piss Christ, and is an installation that features a sculpture of Jesus and about 40,000 honey bees.

Each cell was filled with honey before the public viewing, over time the bees cleaned the honey out of the cells and took it back to their hive. It is a comment on the human condition and the manipulation of living creatures. I love this relationship of a sculptural work and living things.



This work, The Sulking Skeletons of Marc Da Cunha Lopes, is as close as I could get to finding any skeleton sculpture. Still, I want to do something different.



I am in love with this piece by Simon Johan. Mocking the domestication and possible joke of toy dogs? I'll keep thinking about it.

Research continued

Here are two pictures from "Head On" by Cai Guo-Qiang, and also 3 pictures from Simen Johan's exhibition entitled Until the Kingdom Comes . Both of these artist are working with "natural" subjects and is experimenting and seeming to comment on possible domestication of animals and our twisted views of the wild.

I am inspired by both of these artist's work in sculpture as well as still image in the same show. I too want to work similar to this style.

Re-assemblage of the bovine and what it eats: research

Here is the first little post between my production construction of the train of thought leading up to this project. Doing an image search to find some work similar to what I'm interested in I found no specific bone sculpture artists, but I was continually drawn to photography or furniture.

One of the first searches I made was "disturbing furniture". I found Charlotte Kingsnorth's piece, "at One". A functional piece commenting on the media coverage of obesity and inspired by the works of painter Jenny Saville.

New Semester, new medium?

Just to get the writing going, here is my proposal for the Duchamp workspace. By relation, this proposal tranformed into my first production proposal of sorts. Brief explanation of the potentially foot-in-mouth project:

In the Duchamp workspace I plan to construct a body of sculptural work with bones to accompany videos I will be making at the same time. These will be structures that may be static, functional furniture, or even movable sculpture. * The space will be where the pieces will be put together and housed because I would have no place other than my apartment to keep them. All of the pre-production for them like sanding and drilling has already been done and any further work will be done downstairs in the workshop. Duchamp will also be where I document and work on the multimedia installation construction.

I have all of my materials, bones, camera, drill, screws, etc and ready to start construction immediately.
This project will be completed by September 13, but will also be an ongoing exploration in sculpture with the bones and other materials during the span of my inhabitation there.

*More specifically this work is an exploration and re-assembly of the bovine, and what it eats. By showing at a microscopic level how corn is re-assembled, in turn the things that consume it will also change slightly in biology. Is this natural? I want present a class of (un)naturalites and hope to conjure the question of what it means to be natural. Does it really matter? These are natural bones being constructed to make new natural forms just like corn is made into high fructose corn syrup; but I still will not eat things containing this product. But is the state of nature similar to what Alan Moore states about miracles? “Miracles, by their definition, are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.” Does it matter? I want wade hip deep in this issue of biotechnology and agricultural industry for a time and try to find my place. Again I find myself torn between two places not belonging in either.