Oddballs

When I’d finished making the pieces for The Corporation exhibition, I was creatively exhausted. And I had a jar of paperclips left over. Over the next two years, at moments when I found myself in flat, windless studio doldrums, I’d pluck out a paperclip and bend it and twist it until it became a new something. Surprisingly, I didn’t run out of shapes, just paperclips. Some number of doldrums later I found myself with one empty jar and 89 sculptures that I call “Oddballs”.

Naming bypasses the conscious to relate sounds to things in a form of intuition that encompasses all of the namer’s lived experience. In mine, a memory of the first time I heard a word spoken, and/or the first speaker of it, results in a permanent association of word and circumstances. In this case, assigning names to forms has created new associations actively. Then, as we see with children, their names start to inform them.

The Flemish names I’ve given these, like their objectsakes, map surprising lines with just a few turns. With 2-3 syllables they manage to look complex and multi-multisyllabic. They’re weird and lovely and you want to rendezvous with them under a gas lamp over absinthe as you roll the name around in your mouth like a cockle shell.

The whole series is presented in an artist book, for which I’m currently seeking a publisher.