Tag: soft sculpture

Sue Williams, Irresistible, rubber, 1992, text on sculpture reads: Thanks for the beer. Love is forgiving. If you don’t care about yourself, how do you expect others to–you dumb bitch. I didn’t do that. Have you been seeing someone–huh slut. I think you like it mom. Look what you made me do. The No. 1 cause of injury to women is battery (men) Course no one asks what the women did. He’s under a lot of uh———oh do. So uptight. Can you find something to ram in her mouth? We don’t know if she enjoyed it or not. This case remains a mystery.

Kiki Smith, Blood Pool , 1993, wax, gauze and pigment

“NUD CYCLADIC 10, along with NUD CYCLADIC 3 (Tate T13451) and NUD CYCLADIC 6 (Tate T13453), is one of a series of sculptures made in 2010 by Sarah Lucas collectively referred to as NUDS. Each is made from tan nylon tights stuffed with pale-coloured fluff and twisted into an ambiguous, biomorphic form, resting on top of a plinth made from breezeblocks stacked on a wooden base. The sheer nylon tubes, contorted into looped and knotted forms are at once suggestive of fleshy body parts and smooth mottled marble. While the shapes evoke limbs and orifices, it is not possible to fix the forms to a single figurative referent: the suggestion of one body part dissolves as the hint of another emerges.In the catalogue for British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, curator Tom Morton has written of the NUDS:they are not quite male, or female, or even quite human. Looking at these bulbous shapes, we think of spilt guts and detumescent genitalia, of skin filigreed with varicose veins and the tender folds of a recently shaved armpit … Beached on their breezeblock plinths, Lucas’s sculptures might be interpreted as meat on a butcher’s block, or bodies on an autopsy table … although they are too restless, too squirmingly alive, to be reduced to a single reading … Unbothered by the viewer’s gaze, they revel in their own polymorphous perversity, penetrating their own orifices in endless loops of pure physical sensation.
(Tom Morton in Hayward Gallery 2011, p.98.)”

—Tate

Source: tate.org.uk