Knob Column

(in progress)

marble, plaster, pigment

 

 

I go through phases of doodling the same thing over and over. For a time it was a straight line up, and then a series of curves falling back down the front. It was a schematic of the human body in profile, where each protrusion from the profile was an equal unit.

A neutralized homunculus. A simple stupid way of understanding how the body divides itself.  After an interval of a few years, I found myself doodling it again, and curious to see how a doodle could become a sculpture, I made one.

I stacked a series of cast plaster knobs and then filled in their back half to create the unified ground from which they extend. The object moves back in forth in scale, from a body to a cross section of the intestine, to a series of breasts or bullets, to a stack of cells forming, just beginning to orient themselves front to back, top to bottom.

It is also a caryatid, a column and a human form pressed into each other. This led me to think of the object, itself composed of units, as one unit in a group that could form a colonnade. To that end, I created a mold of the 6 ft. tall model, and now have the capability to produce many more.