Project 1: Process
ARTIST RESEARCH

Artist #1: JANINE ANTONI

Janine Antoni is an artist whose work in sculpture mainly focuses on process, notably process as a metaphor. According to PBS, "Antoni's work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. Transforming everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, Antoni's primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body."

In many of her artworks, including "Gnaw" (1992), "Lick and Lather" (1993), "Loving Care" (1993) and "Slumber" (1993), Antoni uses her different body parts, like her hands, mouth, hair, and brain to perform different commonplace activities, like washing, chewing, licking, and dreaming to create her sculptures. Antoni's works speak of femininity, sensuality, abstraction, and expressionism. And these concepts are embodied not only in the sculpture itself, but also in the process and sometimes the performance that Antoni undergoes in order to make her sculptures.

"Lick and Lather"

All of Antoni's work is very personal. Not only is her primary tool for her artwork her own body, but many of the materials used in her sculptures have very intimate relationships to herself. For example, in her work "Moor," Antoni weaves together a rope made from different fabrics that were once clothes that belonged to different people in her life. She says in an interview that "a rope is an umbilical cord... It's something connects to things." The sculpture not only connects Antoni's life to all of the different people whose fabric-remnants are weaved within the sculpture, but it also connects these people to each other.

"Moor"

Artist #2: TARA DONOVAN

Tara Donovan is also a female artist whose work focuses on process. To make her sculptures, Donovan takes extremely large quantities of commonplace manufactured materials, including pencils, styrofoam cups, buttons, toothpicks, paper plates, fishing line, and many many other things of the sort, and puts them together in a way that the sculptures seems to give life to these nonliving, ordinary, everyday objects. When she chooses a material, she seems to learn the inherent characteristics of the material and is able to transform these characteristics into art. Donovan uses thousands, and even millions of whatver material she is using and the effect of these grand and giant sculptures is one that enables the sculpture to create its own atmosphere and replaces the qualities of the material that a viewer would normally associate the material with, with an almost ethereal beauty.

"Untitled" (2003) - this sculpture is made from styrofoam cups and hot glue

"Untitled" (2003) - this sculptures is made from paper plates and glue

"Toothpicks" (2001) - this sculpture is made out of tooth picks and held together by friction and gravity only