Artist's
Statement 1
The expression of an artist's
intelligence through the manipulation of materials is sculpture. Intelligence
includes body intelligence. Materials include any and every thing. A sculptor's
intent determines whether the sculpture is the act or the object. There
is always an action, sometimes resulting in a sculptural object and sometimes
leaving only the residue of the action.
Stelae, column, lingam, figure
are an architecture of the body heralding the psyche. These forms are
essential to opening a larger space where I can move, that the psyche
can occupy.
The movement originates from
a center matrix. A body in motion. A mass in flux. The edge of the motion
is the sculptural surface, where the play of light makes the form real
to our eye as a bump in the dark makes it real to our touch, body, mind.
Artist's
Statement 2
1) I would like to say nothing
and just have people look at and touch the sculpture.
2) I would like to have the
sculpture touch, and help to liberate our psyches. Psyches need a large
space -- our psyches need to fly. Psyche is the Greek word for both butterfly
and for mind-spirit.
3) In the Dhamapada, an ancient
Buddhist text, it says, "...your work is to discover your work and
then with all your heart give yourself to it." That is the creative
process, whether making clay sculpture or writing a poem -- to lose oneself
in the process.
4) "...Art is an unlimited
path..." Tayamo, the luminous Zapatec painter, is truthful.
5) Clay is history. Scientists
now believe that first life began in it. A creation myth says that Jehovah
formed the first man out of it. Some of the oldest surviving artifacts
of culture are made of it. Clay holds the fossils of some earliest forms
of life in its own fossilized shape, in shale.
6) Clay seems like it's just
sticky mud, but its particles are flat and slide against one another making
it capable of fantastic modeling feats. It's like a three-dimensional
photograph of an action, a motion, emotion, a thumbprint, or the whack
of a paddle.
7) These are sculptures of
my energies, motions, thoughts -- the movement in my studio. They are
figurative -- and they are about more than the figure.
...to use figure as a vehicle
to a deeper space, a physical place where understanding is possible.
The understanding is not
vague or grand, but precise and fragmentary.
In my dream, I had to choose
between the flat simple stroke of a comic book world or the reality
of light playing over a tree in full leaf. I did not know how to start
the painting so I pinched it in clay, years later.
Complexity is easier to
paint on a three-dimensional surface.
- Amy
Evans McClure
|