“Inosculation,” Urban Arts Space, Columbus, OH, 2012
Group show
Carmel Buckley & Candace Black, collaborators
For the Inosculation exhibition Candace Black and I started talking about working from each other’s drawings and making a sculpture that came out of that experience. In the spirit of inosculation we intertwined our separate practices to see what happened. We ended up making one large sculptural piece that used some of Candace’s molds, an abandoned half-finished piece (which we decided to use as a starting point), and one of my drawings taken as a loose frame of reference. Nothing was pre-planned, and we progressed to making and interpreting drawn lines into a sculptural landscape of hybrid forms and physical marks. It was playful and serious research and we felt enabled by dual authorship. We made things that we then edited out, and we stopped halfway through making a section as we thought that there was enough information in the piece for the viewer to fill in the blanks. We continued with this process for ten days or so until deciding that any more additions would start to undo the piece. We felt that it was done, inosculated.
While working, we had a safety net comprising our “gold” pieces. In the summer of 2011 Candace had helped me to gold-leaf a cardboard box, a piece I was interested in showing as we had both contributed to its making. Candace had a drain cover made from a mold in plaster and covered in gold leaf. Coincidentally, I had worked on a series of drawings of drain covers several years previously. We unpacked these gold pieces to see if they had a relationship. They seemed to be material and conceptual companions, for as box and drain cover in the real world they had been objects normally overlooked by the public and of very little intrinsic value. The objects naturally shared a space as a couple.
