Sparky
A Venture into Sculpture
A few week’s ago I wrote about my time as an intern at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and how it impacted my work. The following year, after fiddling around with papier-mâché in hopes of building a few masks, I took the subway to see the Lee Bontecou Retrospective at MOMA Queens and my mind was officially blown. This had happened at retrospectives of Van Gogh and Jackson Pollack, but they had both left me in tears and distraught for weeks. I also cried at the Bontecou exhibition, but out of joy and exhilaration. There was not one misstep, one weak piece. Even the case of her tiny ceramics, especially her tiny ceramics, made me want to run home and create. But I couldn’t go, I had to walk through the rooms four or five more times and only left because the museum was closing.
It is hard to single anything out, the big gaping canvas wall sculptures from the fifties are terrifying, her drawings are magnificent, the previously mentioned tiny ceramics with their odd little eyes, but I think the piece that impacted me most was a solitary standing sculpture titled The Grounded Bird. It was not as dramatic or inventive as the other work, but I knew it had something to teach me. Once home, I began a series of sketches that incorporated those I’d done at the Smithsonian with new ideas about funny eyes and concave mouths until I was ready to get serious. There were a couple practice pieces before Sparky, both were 3 dimensional but had to hang on a wall and I wanted the work to be free-standing. Also, being broke, I decided to recycle all sorts of plastic products and newspaper. Sparky has one foot in a yogurt cup full of plaster to keep him stable while the other leg is a Poland Springs bottle. His arms are shaped with those styrofoam plates that sliced fruit or meat comes on, and there’s plenty of old bubblewrap trapped in layers of packing tape under even more layers of papier-mâché made with a stack of New York Times and library paste. Then there’s the coats of pointillistic paint and acrylic varnish. He took weeks to make, and he’s a bit faded now at twenty years old, but he’s standing on his own next to my TV.
Here is the link to the MOMA Queens show - I hope you get inspired. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/121