Art is personal. At the root of my inspiration is memory, certain moments mingling with the mind to later be unleashed in bursts of creativity. Ingrained in my memory is the image of green stomach bile in a flaccid, clear bag, and the delicate sag of skin pinned together with giant staples. In 2011 my Mum had a tumour removed from her stomach. In retrospect I believe this instilled in me a magnetism towards the human body; initially creating figure-heavy sculptures and drawing limbs that push bodily limits. We are fleshy machines, that when in a state of disrepair are stuffed with tubes and pumped through with fluids until the body regains functional autonomy. In the same light my Dad’s bodywork repair shop has always been a warehouse of curiosities; metal and rubber components of cars splayed out around their empty shells, the cold organs to lifeless mechanical bodies. These soft and hard bodies form the base of my practice. They have developed in recent sculptures to reflect my uncanny fascination with the body’s biomechanical capacity. Soft bodied materials culminate in bulbous plaster shapes, in the fleshy rolls of expanded foam and in the coarse investigation of texture in cement and concrete. The hard bodied materials—metal frames and found objects like car parts, hoover shells and old gas tanks—initiate and structure the work. Prior to February 2022 I had exclusively used car paint to colour my sculptures. After Bloomin’ Hell (Feb, 22) I moved away from car paint as it was limiting; consequently colours became more accessible. Some of the colours are extracted from prominent memories. The types of paint I am currently using (house paint, acrylic, outdoor gloss paint, spray paint) each have their own texture that intentionally opposes the materials they coat.
Rebecca Warren has said of her process, ‘it’s all stuff in the world going through you as a filter…’ with regard to how she confronts ideas and their relationship to her experiences. To an extent the emotional and artistic stimulus that I find in the discarded objects of others agrees with this. The historical fabric of each thing adds a layer to my process of assembling materials together. My studio space is a testament to this; intrinsic to my creative development is the overcrowding of random objects in a corner, like a car-boot sale, where old bits are thrown into new forms, and into re-imagined contexts. Since ‘Anthropomorphic Mechanisms’ (Dec, 21) I have experimented with animated shapes that attach and push through objects, some tracing the energy that flows through and around their pressurised shells. On the stem of this process is a deep interest in form, encouraged by the inquisitive contours of Henry Moore’s sculptures and the investigative plaster maquettes of Auguste Rodin, that has led me to come away from predictable figurative shapes and towards ambiguous silhouettes. What is most intriguing about these non-human shapes is their retention of the potential to be perceived as alive, as strange pseudo-bodies. It is the nature of human perception to seek bodily attributes in organic shapes and moving objects. For instance, Dean Kenning’s ‘Little Creatures’ have been interpreted as being animistic, despite their very simple components. My degree show installation seeks to explore this agency in movement through kinetic sculptures.
Random objects pile up in my studio space, comparable to the home of a hoarder, catalysing a different approach to the staging of the work. The scrap around me was forcing itself into a spontaneous plinth investigation: sculptures stacked on disused fridge-freezers, empty propane bottles and upturned buckets gave way to a further process of mounting sculptures on objects until each sat on its correct base. Rachel Harrison’s plinths-as-sculptures motivated the texturising of these informal plinths to operate as part of the sculpture, adverse to the historical staging of sculptures on podiums to deify. Brancusi’s ‘Endless Columns’, specifically ‘Maiastra’ (1910-12), repeats plinth-like shapes up through the body of the sculptures. Expanding my interest in this concept I continued the act of stacking and mimicking the base structure with different industrial materials, caking each layer in ironically contrasting textures. My sculptures perform with the intention of stimulating physical sensations, a throb, under the skin.
lydiasculpture 