Artist Name

Erin Meagher

Title

The Masts Hurt

Medium

Sculpture

Visual Description

Hand-sized, fingertip-sized, and finger-sized pieces of a cut-up painting are stacked on thin strips of metal wire around a circle. I took a canvas about the size of my arms stretched out, so about five feet tall and five feet wide and I covered it with yellow paint and then I covered the canvas in one corner with black pain and then I stepped into the paint on the canvas and walked across the yellow and stamped my feet. Then I dripped dots of different shades of blue and purple in various parts of the canvas. And then I expressed frustration and anger with hard strokes of green and pouring the paint directly from a bottle in swirls of black and red and neon orange. On a second canvas, I left the background unpainted and covered the canvas in layers of dots, smudges, swirls, scratches, drips, and scribbles. I then cut up the canvas into pieces the size of my fingertips, fingers, hands, and forearms and broke the painting apart so that it does not anymore tell one story but is many pieces. Then I took thin pieces of wire that are strong enough to stand up straight and I poked them into a circle of foam that is round around, about the size of two hands spread out next to each other, and empty inside the radius, like a crown. And around the radius of the circle of foam I poked the wire pieces in. Then I poked the different sized pieces of canvas onto the wire. The small pieces are poked onto straight thin wires. The wire pieces can still stand although they bend each one differently with the weight of the pieces of canvas they hold. And the different pieces overlap on the wire on top of each other, all facing outwards as much as possible, so you can see the different pieces layered, and so the colors and images can be seen from different views moving in a circle around the sculpture. And so it no longer tells any story, and yet it sort of looks like a ship of masts with no visible ship at all. It has curve, and bend, and movement, because the pieces of the paintings cause the wire to bend. Overlapping pieces of bright and dark colors from a chaotic pattern some sense of calm movement emerges.

Materials

Acrylic paints and oil pastels on canvas and wire on foam base

Image Source

Jenna Fischer