LAURA LINDSEY WEST

STATEMENT OF AESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY

My current work takes figurative elements and places them in minimally derived formats.  The body is a vessel.  We are carried through life in fragile containers of skin and bone.  The idea that without the spirit the body is essentially empty is ancient, however, since my work with cadavers (which in contrast to the live model is vacant), this concept has remained central. 

My early work dealt solely with this issue of body as vessel, but with my personal explorations into architecture and minimalism, I began to see structures as another  type of vessels.  With Minimalism, the sign/signifier message behind the artwork is reduced to the point that meaning can only be derived from the interaction of the viewer’s body with the work.  Robert Morris’s “Passageway,” for example, guides viewers down an ever narrowing hallway that has no exit.  In this piece the subject matter is not the structure of the passage or the wood it is made from, nor is it ‘re—presentation’ of a hallway.  The subject matter is the viewer’s experience of compression.  It is my own desire to cause the viewer’s experience to become part of the final work that has led me to create pieces in the same scale as the human body and to work within installation/environmental formats, which require the viewer to physically explore the piece.

I understand that my work, being essentially figurative, is measured against a long historical tradition of figurative sculpture.  But from my frame of reference, it is just as difficult to come up against the recent tradition of abstraction.  In abstraction, the self and its images are laid aside for what Brancusi terms “more important ideals.”  With the Clement Greenburgian ideals that “purely abstract art was the logical extension of the mainstream,” the representational figure was denoted in Modern art to a second class status.  However, the wave of figurative sculptors such as Kiki Smith, Magdelena Abakanowicz and Antony Gormley are certainly evidence that sculptors are rebelling against this sentiment.  There is a difference though, between this new movement and the figurative traditions of the past.  The pre-modern sculptors have merely copied the body – “making corpses,” as Brancusi put it.  Contemporary figurative artists are dealing with the spirit inside of the body and the body’s function in life and death. It is no longer merely a “corpse,” but something personal.  The new tradition of the body rebels against idealization of the figure as a machine and emphasizes the body’s temporal imperfections.  The new tradition, like my own work celebrates the body’s journey through life.

I have always held a fascination for the un-noticed parts of the body such as feet and backs, however in the last year I have developed a particular enchantment with the fullness of a pregnant belly.  I have been forming these castings into hollow fiberglass eggs as well as solid clay and iron eggs and placing them within both constructed and found structures.  In these arrangements I have been seeking to create a spiritual tension between life and death.  In most of my recent work, I am either bringing a created element into found natural constructs or I am bringing elements of nature into the gallery to interact with my form.  This work began when I moved from the open, grand space of Montana to the congested, industrial location of New Jersey and has continued in the varied landscape of California. 

I have played with the use of the lasting media of cast bronze and iron in contrast with more fragile media of wax and fiberglass for nearly two decades.  In the past two years, I

have added a new direction in the use of digital technologies to create 3-dimensional forms and am exploring the conceptional implications of the use of machines to reproduce sculptural forms.

With my work, I want the viewers to ask questions about their own bodies, their interaction with the space around them and their place in the outer world.