botanical curiosities and junkyard byrds: Domestic Refusals, Odd Sculptures and Paintings

Domestic Refusals, Odd Sculptures and Paintings

Semi-Perishable...
Stove elements, steamer fins, piano parts, momento mori in canning jars: dried leaves, shells, moth wings, snake skins, etc. Kitchen tools, table legs, muffin tins, wooden coat hangers, forks, beaters and one mother of pearl button (also one pickle fork with a wooden hanger shaft).

The Gardener.. Rusty shovel head of some venerable age..terra cotta pots, brass hose nozzles, rake heads and fencing and various doodads from around the garden...body is a splendid and discarded fragment of copper roofing with verdigris...she stands beside my mother's (the gardener) front door. Private Collection

The Seamstress...
6' tall. Wood frame. An old cotton steaming ham is suspended from a table loom with wooden clothes pegs and celluloid buttons, wooden spools from my grandmothers basket, porcelain doll hands and rotating spools with pertinent info...chest top is a mosaic of old bone, shell, bakelite and miscellaneous buttons. Knitting bag handles, black fabric, needles, pins and thimbles, etc. Her sternum is a wooden rocking chair rocker and the ribs are old loom spindles. A collage of sewing patterns is translucent and mounted upon a screen. Dyed twine wraps her sturdy legs..my grandmother was a seamstress and dress designer. Private Collection

Working with domestic debris:
means the scale of an 'Upright Refusal' is close to my own...makes me more comfortable than designing work that I cannot move around by myself.

Domestic Refusals:
Tears (fossilized) closed and open and Ecko.eco.echo

Flexello...some corpus components: broken stove door glass, stove elements, wine goblets, porcelain citrus juicer, assorted buttons, muffin tins, table legs, an iron rest and some superior graters...all chucked out. Flexello refers to the satisfyingly spinning shoulder wheels.

Domestic Refusal - Upright # 2...The Kitchen Goddess - Stove elements, meat tenderizers, free spinning rolling pen (inlaid with tiny mother of pearl buttons), porcelain doll hands, an array of wooden spoons, gas stove cross, muffin tins and the all purpose multi-purpose graters.

Detail with mother of pearl buttons inlaid in rolling pin...the doll hands are porcelain...bound with household twine.

Eckoecoecho

Upright Domestic Refusal / Fossilized Tears

Domestic Refusal / Fossilized Tears detail...doll house flatware, meat chart c. 1950...text from Johnathan Swift, essay re maidens (virgins) and lions,."Are you in Tears over crusty pans?" ad for Brillo, Barbie doll hand & tears: which are brass tacks in a tiny vial.

You can call me Al...back and front

With over thirty years of metal work, primarily silver jewelry design and construction, behind me, and a recalcitrant thumb as a result of all that I am on to a much larger scale. Six-foot tall assemblages resemble in many ways the body adornment I made for so long. I’ve always had an attraction to found objects, rejected and damaged remnants of our civilization and with a local recycling depot such a vital part of our community these riches are easily mined. This I do both physically and digitally, collecting a variety of like items with which to fashion my sculptures. Domestic refuse become “Domestic and Upright Refusals” and stand like sentinels or warriors with muffin tin armor and stove burner masks, they sport mosaic details, broken glass, pottery, buttons and bobbins, wings of worn wooden spoons and legs of aged graters. Articles as diverse as red high heel shoes, piano keys and broken dolls have commingled with rolling pins, steaming hams and stainless steel steamers to become figurative, stand alone pieces.

With each acquisition of another patina rich, much battered metal cooking implement or well oiled, badly burned wooden spoon there are opportunities to collect photo records of other discarded treasures and I bring a camera load back to the studio with every trip. These rich textures and crazy patterns become fabulous backdrops for collage, and with the addition of select text from those handy encyclopedias of helpful hints for the homemaker or the medical advice literature of the 1940s and 50s allow me to recall my childhood with the horror and humour that I now feel for it.

Dunlop...the Gentleman's Gentleman
Racquet, rear view mirror, hanger, dress maker's tape, chess pieces, furniture bits, knife rest, golf club, cigarette lighter, golf tee, die, chest of drawers (lined with wooden rulers), double breasted suit jacket, shoe strechers, wine corks, towel holder, piano skin (reverse), & belt...etc. 6' tall.