ENSEMBLES OF PAPER SCULPTURE

Tumble-up

Sculpture 2019-2020

 

They say seven is the perfect number of people for a dinner party: not too crowded but enough not to force participants into couples or leave someone out. It would be a good number for an emerging dance company, too. So I made a group of seven sculptures. They are an entity as a group; they were all finished on the same day.

 

They are smaller than sculptures in my first, “red”, group. It was scary to accept them like that: what if they will be seen as nothing: as a crumpled sheet of paper. Incidentally, I know exactly what they are: they are all me, but much younger – age around 4. 

They twirl and play like a group of kids in class; they are awkward, they make mistakes.

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Which makes them younger than my red sculptures – those were also me, but perhaps age 10 version. Does it mean that in order to grow up we need to go back in time, all the way to our childhood?

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While I was working on them, I often had the feeling, walking into the studio in the morning, that they want something from me, that they want me to do something on their behalf. Perhaps they want me to listen to them, or to help them, even rescue them. Perhaps they just want me to run an errand. But when they are finished, they don’t want anything any longer. They don’t need me, they have each other. They are content, and they let me go.

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Lydia Gladkova

December 2020