Sculpture Studio Portfolio

rachel padding

Project 4- Self Designed
ARTIST RESEARCH and Bibliography

My initial interest in Hans Bellmer’s work began quite a few years ago. His work has always captivated me because his style is similar to mine, and I often use his work as inspiration for my own. I really love his themes of sex, death, dreams, and surrealism, but, specifically, I chose to research him for this project because his work was described as a “controlled hallucination” in the book by Sarane Alexandrian. My final project is an attempt to bring forth my dreams to create a “controlled hallucination” in this world.
Hans Bellmer was born in 1902 in Katowice, Silesia. His first actual artwork lead to his arrest in 1922, and, shortly thereafter, he began attending Berlin Polytechnic for engineering (the profession of his father). He dropped out in 1924 and began work as a book printer and illustrator. In 1927 he married and began his own agency in Berlin. In 1933, he began actively protesting Nazism, and he begins constructing his doll as part of that effort. From there, his artistic endeavors take flight until his death in Paris in the year 1975.
Many of Bellmer’s intentions and themes manifest in his most famous work, Doll, which began a long string of works which experimented with the doll. My second source said of the Doll, “It was designed to fulfil his need to escape from reality and to arouse desires associated with the secret sexual encounters of his adolescence. By its provocative eroticism it would strike a blow against tyranny and authority.” So, protest was one purpose of his work with the doll, but that specific purpose was backgrounded by many other themes. One recurring goal of his work was to provide an escape from reality or a window into the subconscious, dark, primordial human mind. Consequentially, much of his work influenced and was influenced by surrealism, although he did not directly identify himself with the surrealist movement. Doll is an accurate manifestation of most of Bellmer’s themes. With all of his doll works, he is warping reality to reflect the dreams and subconscious of the human mind which include sex, death, and feverish, dream-like images. Alexandrian says of Bellmer’s work, “Disturbing and marvelous, like a black diamond, finding a common identity in pleasure and pain, cold delirium and burning reason, Bellmer’s work is the product of a man who has always judiciously cultivated his passions, his ideas and his dreams” (page 7).
These same qualities and themes are rampant in Bellmer’s drawings as well as his doll sculptures. For example, his piece, The Brick Cell, encompasses most of his previous themes. This piece is a dream scape which explores sex, death, and dreams in an amorphous and feverish way. This piece looks like a dream, and we can see various sexualized objects with grows or amputated limbs. All of this exists in a structure that references our world but could never actually exist within our world outside of dreams.
My intentions with this piece are quite similar on one level. It is my desire to create a controlled hallucination, a dream which exists in this world. Originally I wanted the work to be ethereal and effervescent, but, while I hope to accomplish those as well, after closely observing Bellmer’s intentions, I want this dream structure to be disturbing. Looking into the primordial waters of the mind, even dreams, is a dark task, and I want my work to reflect that. I think that Bellmer’s work is an exploration of the inner-workings of the mind, and it is also a questioning: if our minds work in terms of sex and death, why is it so disturbing to see them manifest in the real world? Why are these deep, feral instincts disturbing to us if they are our own? I want to work with this line of questioning in my final work.
Unlike Bellmer, I do not want my final to explicitly reference sex. I want it to be visceral and perhaps slightly baroque (which, in their own right, are sensual and reflective of sexual desire), but I want the content to be more ambiguous. I feel the same way about incorporating death into my work. With both sex and death, I would like to leave the audience disturbed just enough to let those thoughts creep into their minds without solidifying. My goal is to create a beautiful structure which is also disturbing because it is a manifestation of the subconscious, the primordial, and the feral aspects of the human mind: a dream or a hallucination. I want the themes to manifest on their own, without my explicit inclusion of them into my work, in order to make the audience truly aware of the fact that this dream structure is a product of the mind as is their own reaction.
As far as this class is concerned, Bellmer’s work does not focus on process or location. Bellmer’s work elicits a certain type of interaction which is centered around the audience’s emotions and subconscious. Alexandrian comments on the interactivity of Bellmer’s work: “Seeing is no longer passively observing what is, but selecting, comparing, actively determining what could or should be. Bellmer turns looking into an extension of touching. The eye suddenly has to feel the shapes, to knead them, change them around, until a new reality emerges from them” (page 22). With that in mind, my project is something of a modified revisiting of the idea of interactivity. While my piece will not literally be interactive, I want it to be a reflection of the human mind within a dream. If I can successfully create a dream scape which is both lovely and disturbing, the audience will interact with it mentally as if it were their own mind process, their own hallucination, or their own dream.
In researching Hans Bellmer’s work, I have been able to compare my intentions with his and more concretely define what exactly I’m hoping to do. Hans Bellmer creates dream scapes which explore the ideas of death, sex, love, instinct, and the human mind. He uses specific language and images to create a visceral and interactive experience with his audience, and he creates an internal questioning of the mind through this process. It is my goal, therefore, to utilize some of his methods to create a dream scape which reflects the beauteous nature of dreams while simultaneously reminding one that this beautiful image originates from a mind ridden with sex and death. I want to create a beautiful dream scape which is slightly disturbing on some level, and that slightly disturbing aspect of the piece will be the aspect which reflects the dark side of the human mind.
My second artist is Petah Coyne. I chose to do my research on Coyne because her aesthetic is quite similar to my intended aesthetic, and she also creates dream scapes in a sculptural form (as opposed to Bellmer, who works primarily with pencil and paper) which is the overall theme of this project for me.
Petah Coyne was born in Oklahoma City, Ohio in 1953. In 1973, she attended Kent State University, and, in 1977, she moved on to the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Her sculpture is very specific in terms of materials, and she often works with materials that are quite visceral and reminiscent of baroque style artwork such as wax, faux-roses, feathers, ribbon, beads, strands of faux-pearls, faux-birds, satin, lace and buttons. Jane Harris (villagevoice.com) said of Coyne’s work: “With only hints of color—yellow, pink, peach, red, and green—peeking through, the work's starkness recalls the sculpture of Louise Nevelson, who similarly transformed found objects into poetic abstractions, exploiting the metaphoric power of black and white to evoke polarities of life and death, purity and sin, beauty and ugliness” (source 1).
In many ways, Coyne and Bellmer have similar themes, influences, and goals which is why I chose to research them. Petah Coyne is an artist who’s work I am largely unfamiliar with, but I think the influence of instinct is apparent in her art work as it is in Bellmer’s. I chose to continue researching Coyne because of her attention to instinct and feeling. She said in an interview, “But perhaps first we could talk about the fact that I almost always work intuitively. My mother trained me to trust my instincts. As I get older, I trust them more. Women have this instinctual ability to know stuff we shouldn’t know. I don’t know how” (source 2).
Coyne also examines universal dichotomies and, more specifically, death. She said of her wax sculptures, “The sculptures always deal with death, dead birds, taxidermy, dead fish, and yet beauty, too, like the pearls and other things that I use in these pieces” (source 2). Her obsession with death within her work began very early when, while living in New York, she collected, preserved, and hung up dead fish. All of her work, like Bellmer’s, deals with the dichotomy of dark and light which exists within the human psyche.
She has a series of hanging works which she views as representative of this dichotomy in and of themselves. They look like chandeliers, hung and draped with flowers, beads, birds, hair, ribbons, and wax, and they are either all black or all white. Coyne said, “I think it’s about pretense, all the work is pretense. They’re hanging from the ceiling, seemingly very delicate and easily breakable. Instead, what they really are is a threat. They’re extremely heavy, and if they fell on you, they’d crush you. So the work has all these dimensions” (Source 2). Coyne was also inspired by the dichotomies of many Japanese aesthetics “with its sense of the extreme, black or white, delicate or harsh” (Source 2).
This translates well in terms of my project. Her aesthetic is something I am very interested in, and, after researching her, I hope to bring an element of Neo-Baroque style to my piece. I feel that her use of aesthetics is both lovely and disconcerting, and, because that is my goal, I am in a sense taking ques from her work. Her materials are also reflective of what I might be using for my final, and I have obtained some new ideas from my research. She enjoys working with flowing, gossamer, filmy, effervescent materials in combination with masked, somewhat repulsive materials (which, again, are a manifestation of her theme of dichotomies). Because of her work, I have also considered using wax, candles, faux-flowers, or hair-like materials.
I also really liked her choice of color because it matches my aesthetic as well. I tend to work with black, white, and an additional color, although Coyne works singularly with black and white. This project will be completely white except for three components which will be bright purple. Naturally, I am drawn towards Coyne’s white pieces for inspiration for my work.
As far as intentions are concerned, we differ in a number of different areas. She seems to want to make something beauteous out of something repulsive primarily while secondarily examining universal dichotomies. I want to reference dichotomy, but, primarily, I want to create a dream scape. Aside from that, she focuses on process and interactivity (neither exclusively) but hardly pays any attention to location at all. Process was not initially a concern for me, but Coyne’s work shows enough process to reveal both the lovely and repulsive materials that she works with. This was interesting to me, and I would like to incorporate it into my work.
Her concept of interactivity lines up well with both my own and Bellmer’s in that it forces the audience to explore the materials with their eyes. I like the idea of making an object so detailed and so simultaneously muddled that the audience must examine, must feel it with their eyes. I also like Bellmer’s idea of extending the sense of touch through the eyes, and I would like to use more materials than I initially planned in order to achieve this effect.
Overall, I would say that I chose to research Coyne because her aesthetic matches mine. She enjoys combining the lovely with the disturbing in an overall piece that becomes both Gothic and Baroque all at once. She examines death from a compassionate standpoint, as opposed to Bellmer who sensationalizes death to expose the human obsession with its own demise. I also feel that Coyne’s use of material provides complimentary ideas to what I learned from Bellmer. Bellmer’s philosophy and notions captivate me, but Coyne’s aesthetic and experimentation with materials compliments that fascination and sublimates it into what I consider to be the perfect set of influences for my project.