Kayla Gibbons
Cippus 1 (D&H canal)
Painted steel, concrete, wood
We cannot but wish these Urnes might have the effect of Theatrical vessels, and great Hippodmme Urnes in Rome; to resound the acclamations and honour due unto you. But these are sad and sepulchral Pitchers, which have no joyful voices; silently expressing old mortality, the ruines of forgotten times… [1]
Driven by the necessity to recount the otherwise irretrievable, my work attempts to unravel the web of memory to discover the ways that crude material can be transforrned into invented form. The junkyard is utilized as a site for material recuperation wherein my body is the mechanism to re-enliven the closed of discarded parts.
Ancient masonty walls, asphalt, and hand-lettered signs are as receptor surfaces upon which information has been impressed: documents that tabulate information. The work is a process of translation for mortar hieroglyphs where architecture has been demolished and erased, for information skewed between peeling layers of paint palimpsests, maps, a printer's cancelled plates.
Imbued with the rust of time or recuperated and restored, mortal stone is held by the permanence of steel. Each of the realized sculptural forms is assertive in its structural presence, for the strong, who become canonical, never die.
[1] Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial (New York: New Directions Pub., 2010), 24.