Fallible Objects of Infinite Capacity - Artist Statements
Ceci Cole McInturff
WHAT IS HYBRIDITY?
AND WHY USE AND INSTALL ART MATERIALS THAT DON’T LAST?
In a dramatic materials change, I began using organic ephemera – plant and animal material – in 2016: no synthetics, no technology. Requiring innovation and research into novel ways to clean, treat and exhibit, these materials blew open my head and heart on some level, and deepened why to build and share objects, period.
Initially this practice simply presented the works’ oddness or beauty while implying value in the unadorned, the impermanent, the naturalness in death, and reiterating the state of earth’s environment.
Increasingly though, my rationale for this practice has altered. Now largely hybridity-based, I select materials distinctly from before, and combine them for different reasons.
Hybridity most obviously means mixing species…for me the combining of species not usually found in the same ecosystem. In such works I integrate materials beyond just what looks appealing to use hybridity as a metaphor. Mixing species I am suggesting something useful in a seamlessness and lack of boundaries in our own thinking, being, identities and ultimately how we interact with the world.
If put to words, this metaphor is pro-tolerance and applies to badly bifurcated political and social structures. Without words, I use hybrid materials sculpturally to suggest futility in limiting our identification only to labels of body, gender, heritage, orientation. These are all critical in terms of justice and I support them. But there is value in also retaining the ability to see further, to a potentially controversial, constant effort to seek union or episodic harmony across all problematic elements. As takes place in nature.
So this current practice avoids words and uses natural materials in abstract ways to speak to the possible, to unlikely collaborations and integration, and to the intention toward a more collective joining and healing.
The natural wisdom of these uncontrived materials for me is critical, and offers much at this time in our world.
Micheline Klagsbrun
My theme is transformation. For many years I have immersed myself in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, exploring moments of chaos when all is flux and new forms are born. Originally a painter, I now work in mixed media, on paper and in sculpture, incorporating found organic and man-made ephemera.