Arlene Shechet

Arlene Shechet, Dawn, 2024, aluminium, paint.

Arlene Shechet, Bea Blue, 2024, aluminium, paint.

Arlene Shechet (b. 1951, based in New York) is a sculptor known for her ceramic works, but more recently she has been making large scale, painted, metal sculptures. I’m interested in these pieces because they tilt, bend, contort, have tension, and contradiction. They look improvised but they’re also highly technical.

This series of outdoor sculptures is called “Girl Group”. The dual colour combinations in each piece, as well as leaving some parts of the sculptures unpainted, gives them movement as the colours shift in the changing light and contain a multitude of hues. They look precarious and provisional and play with visual paradoxes.

For Shechet, “sculpture is always about movement and the body,” and her works encourage visitors to approach them from different angles to observe how their palette transforms in changing environments.

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman (b. 1955) is a New York-based artist, known for her process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and use non-traditional media including animation, zines and installation. She has a lifelong interest in undoing art-historical notions of mastery, power, and genius, instead favoring doubt, unknowability, and intimacy as integral to art making.

There was a lot in this video that resonated with me. These quotes feel like they could be me talking about my work or what I aspire my work to be - if I was as experienced and articulate as Amy Sillman.

“Part of doing improvisational work is pitting yourself against the materials and the resistance that they offer, and trying to figure out how to make something happen where you’re both working with the materials and also very much working against them and questioning them.”

“You’re editing with your body ... and the next thing depends on the thing before it.”

“You’re dealing with mistakes all the time, and you’re dealing with regret. And like thinking “Oh god no, let me do that again.” So, on the big level and on the little level and on every level in between the slippage between control and finesse and form and wanting it to be good and constantly adjusting things and trying to make it better, and between just like first thought best thought, like let it all hang out, like do a thing see what you’re surprised by, that tension is the tension of me making my work.”

“It's not perfect. It shows its scrape downs and it shows its revision and it shows its finickiness, but it also shows its openness and this maybe vain attempt to like push further or dig deeper.”

“I’m always pretty much looking for something that contradicts the layer that came before, creating a certain kind of tension. And creating something that feels like it sort of holds together and it’s sort of falling apart at the same time … It’s a very elusive position that takes a lot of time to find and then you can’t name it.”

Kirsty Lillico

Kirsty Lillico, Big Love, 2021.

Kirsty Lillico sums up her practice well in this quote from her interview with Objectspace in January 2022.

"I’m Kirsty Lillico, an artist from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. I make sculptures based on architectural floor plans; these often represent modernist high-rise social housing. I cut the shapes out of discarded carpet and hang them so they drape and slump. I am interested in the dictates of modernism, and in the way we live now, and whether modernist ideas still have relevance."

https://www.objectspace.org.nz/journal/interview-with-kirsty-lillico/

She speaks of a central theme to her work being failure, linking that to the way that the utopian ideals of modernist architecture often didn't live up to the social realities. High-density inner-city housing was supposed to be a solution to urban sprawl and provide improved living conditions for at-risk populations, but the reality was very different, resulting in social problems and unsafe communal areas like stairwells.

I'm interested in the way that a modernist utopian future ended up being our dystopian present, but for me there's still a remnant or core of optimism holding everything together. In my work there has to be a strong core keeping the precarious parts together.

Eve Armstrong

Eve Armstrong, Rise, 2013.

Eve Armstrong, Growing Demand, 2017.

Eve Armstrong (b. 1978) is a New Zealand artist who lives and works in Wellington. She creates sculptures, collages, installations, and performances, often using found or discarded objects and materials. She facilitates exchanges of form and value involving waste, recycling, skills, information, and ideas, with an emphasis on transactional and functional processes.

This is from her CV and particularly relevant to me I think ...

"She describes her work as ‘adaptable support structures’ – layers, cycles and flows modeled on rudimentary trade: needing and finding; this goes with that; that props up this, things go up, things go down.

Armstrong’s work is deceptively formal, yet hers is a formalism related to the materiality and function of each works constituent elements. There is a considered emphasis on colour, shape, location, expected and anticipated social engagement, and effects on the overall desire for an energetic mode of working which appears to lack aesthetic intent, but allows for the impacts of formalism."

"Lacking aesthetic intent" is what I'm currently aiming for. Responding to materiality and being driven by what the work needs rather than what I want it to look like.

Anthony Caro (1924-2013)

Anthony Caro, Blue Moon, 2013, stainless steel and Perspex, 54 x 103 x 90 inches

Anthony Caro, Autumn Rhapsody, 2011/12.

Sir Anthony Caro OM CBE, is considered to be one of the world's leading sculptors whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.

He was one of the first to take his sculptures off plinths and put them directly on the ground, giving the viewer a more direct experience of the work. He explored the boundaries between sculpture and painting, music and architecture.  In particular, he was fascinated by interior, contained spaces, constructing works that were not simply for observing but could be physically entered. He also embraced a range of different materials, including bronze, wood, lead, ceramic, paper and Perspex.  The scale of his invention extended from small, intimate pieces to multi-part installations, large-scale sculptures for public spaces and architectural commissions. 

(https://www.anthonycaro.org/about)

Caro was mentioned in the Formalismus article about Michaela Meise, her work being described as "more restrained than Caro's ambitious post-cubist formal compositions" (p.106 Formalismus. Moderne Kunst, heute). As opposed to Eve Armstrong's work, Caro seems to have more of an aesthetic intent, but despite the heavy steel and solid bases, they somehow achieve a lightness and openness that is interesting to me. It's partially the assemblage of different materials and the constrast between planes and curves. I'm starting to see that the heavier planes and lighter curves in my work need each other, not just structurally, but to help each other sing.