Red-out

Sculpture 2012-18

 

I am showing sculptures that had been in the making for six years. I could not walk away from them, and I could not start anything else until they were finished.

 

I worked on them simultaneously although I did not finish them all at once. I worked on them on the floor so they were agglomerating like islands in the midst of junk. But they are not junk. The process was formative. The junk is the fragments the sculptures are made of. The fragments are essential to the process, and I don’t clean until I’m done. I have seven sculptures now. In the process, they were constantly moving against each other in the space of the room, and I was moving around them. They are mutually dependent.

 

My sculptures are hollow. They are made by bending and folding the surfaces so that inside can become outside at any moment, until the very end. Sometimes, it leads to such devastating eruption from inside out that I end up with nothing but red particles on the floor. Oh yes, my sculptures are red. I pick them up and put them together again. They are finished when they don’t have any openings. As long as they have openings they continue to erupt.

 

My sculptures don’t grow in size and each of them can fit into a large cardboard box. But they don’t want to be in a box. They bump against the confines of the size, of the walls, of each other, of the repetitiveness of the form. They want to be different.

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Lydia Gladkova

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December 2018