Art Installations have always intrigued me, mainly because they seem to intra-sensorial experiences, where artworks immerse all sense from the auditory and to the olfactory, more so when audiences are allowed to touch and taste those craft-based experiments that are interactively guided by environmentally conscious art practices.
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GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS are two sculptural pieces which I have recently been captivated by, having come across the work of artist Coral Anne, and each work depicting bodies frozen by the medium chosen by the artist, transformed into testament of what effects has plastic had on the natural world.
Her construction of these bespectacled non-verbal figurines, their expectant faces gazing in anticipation of, be it a miracle of catastrophe; contemplate how “the worship instinct” in humanity tends to seeks solace in the skies, while meting destruction on the planet we call home.
This couple of forlorn figures are sculpted works that seems to focus on observing these products of destruction, in a form of contemplative worship, a supplication to the ancestral of the future, to become cognisant of their present actions, and how they can evolve “destroyed or destructive bodies” of their own.
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And like a cage of human metamorphosis, an enclosed realm that borders the spiritual and animalistic, the installation is full of hypothetical meanings of a realm bursting with wonder and decay.
These figures - seated in a manner of childish supplication, or one with folded arms implying acceptance - are an invitation to see an animalistic perspective that shatters human stereotypes, and these are what makes this installation profound.
These unpretentious forms wrapped in plastic transform innocence in frozen poses, where the notion of their durable death or new life inflicted by or infused with plastics, seems to birth another unnerving awareness of the permanence of our collective futile activities.
And confirming truth of man’s permanence through items such as plastic, this installation explores what human inventions and their inherent contradictions mean for the unknown dimensions impacted by human action.
These somewhat indelicate creations that flake to form micro particles, like toxic remnants or memories within an object that lacks beauty, and is resistant to impermanence, these overt sculptures speak of man’s urge for immortality and the consequences of that expedition.
These GIRLS are deformed elastic abstractions offering a glimpse into a personification that gives value to both the artworks and the objects of environmental degradation, questioning whatever consumerist urges for the creation of such tools from the onset of innovation.
The artistic and conceptual value of plastic activated in these sculptures seems environmentalist, in that they avows a life to inanimate objects that have very animate impact.
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Allegory On The Vanity Of The Spoon
Lately, I have become spellbound by a project titled Allegory of The Vanity Of Spoon, which seems an ambitious project that is increasingly architectural in its approach of physiology and shapes, objects and their value, pushing yet against the formality of social truisms we would expect from environmentally conscious artistic practice.
Setting the bar around issues of ecological sustainability, this work launches a debate around rethinking interventions that would repurpose as well as reimagine damaging materials for the future, and while the artist undertakes personal investigations of the world the surrounds us with comfortability, she reinterprets these itemised comforts as forms of vicarious destruction.
Clad in a garment made of fragments of discarded plastic cutlery formed into a highly personal inventory, the figure bears a history written with non-biodegradable objects, speaking to forgotten patterns of fashionability, materials and industrial forces that shape contemporary degradation of the natural beauty of earth.
Together with her installation in a cage signifying an analogue to a tragedy where trees, their branches suffocated by densely-layered plastic, gesture from our discarded and abandoned detritus, like characters with lost innocence, like fleeting and macabre figures textured with an eerie air of futility and fragility.
Could this be Coral Anne’s approach to artistic explorations of ecological concerns, focusing on the impact of modern consumerism, where “damage” interfaces with the polluters as identities, strangely resembling human behavioural and physical dimensions?
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Through these glossed imperfections and shrink-wrapped forms of stifled innocence, Coral Anne has captured from her surroundings, with an intent minimalist lyricism, her gaze introducing a sensitivity to the imperceptible around us, a form of searching for new aesthetic beyond a mere observation of natural vs built environments.
Images: Roger Jardine
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