Installation view: GEM & SHE
Gem
2019
38 x 20 x 20 in
She
2019
51 x 18 x 11.5 in
The Gift was a project funded by a Research and Development Grant from The Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Arizona Community Foundation. The large-scale glass sculptures are based on earlier plastic sculptures called The Guardians. Constructed out of plastic vacuum-formed toy packaging containers, the translucent sculptures spoke to the ghostly life of things that seem to exist everywhere and nowhere.
From the original sculptures, plaster molds were created before blowing glass into them at the Sonoran Glass School with Paul Anders-Stout and Jason Marstall. The shift in materiality gave the sculptures weight and an increased sense of presence. The casting process altered the shapes, at times accentuating the abstraction and contours of the strangely shaped containers and other times directly translating elements of a product’s branding into the glass.
The plastic toy packaging that inspired the work was collected through generous donations at various children’s birthday parties. The Gift implies remnants of these celebrations as the finished work recalls a beautiful gesture of gift giving between parent and child, as well as a reminder of excesses and imbalances, the environmental impact of the gesture, and the incredible weight given to parental actions. These moments bring into focus the presence of objects within intimate relationships as well as their mediating roles.