Glue Babies Close Up: Hysteric
I got a request to do deep dives into specific pieces and the first one I want to take a closer look at is Hysteric from the March Glue Baby Collection.
I started experimenting with combining the heavily embellished Tiny Terra with other sculptures last year but it wasn’t quite capturing the vision. The allure of heavy embellishment is, in part, simply because I love it, and partly because it works as a metaphor. I think of autoimmune disease, which is what I have, as kudzu choking a forest, or barnacles destroying a ship. Natural but out of control. And I was still looking for how I wanted to express that idea through my art. Then I saw the Great Art Explained episode on Dorothea Tanning1. In it, James Payne shows one of Tanning’s works, The Magic Flower Game, and something clicked in my head.
Tanning’s painting2 shows a figure partially covered in flowers that seem to be transforming them into something otherworldly. The idea of being overwhelmed and suffocated by flowers immediately made sense. A horror at a loss of control set against the calming beauty of flowers created the exact feeling that I had been looking for. I love when art does that, gives you the missing puzzle piece that lets you finally see the picture you have been trying to put together for months or even years. The next morning I started Terraform 3.
In making art about chronic illness, I want to give ideas a twist. I don’t like pity and people feeling bad for me makes me uncomfortable. I want, with my art, to show the beauty that remains in a life of compromise. But there still has to be an ugliness to it, something that shows a lack of consent, even a violence. Just because you “made the best of things” doesn’t mean you’re okay with the “things,” it is not consensual. It toes the line between radical acceptance and resignation. Things that are overgrown do not agree to be consumed, and what they were before lives on underneath, even when their original form is long forgotten.
A word I keep coming back to is annihilation:
the state or fact of being completely destroyed or obliterated : the act of annihilating something or the state of being annihilated
Autoimmune disease means that you are both the victim and the perpetrator. The knife and the wound. The kudzu and the tree. You are the annihilating force and that which is annihilated. There is a tension, a disconnect, a dissonance. Something is being done to you, and you are the one doing it.
I had already started playing with the idea of heavy embellishment with the Tiny Terra. Then, I started making the Terraforms, which are heavily embellished sculptures. Next, I wanted to combine the two and move them onto a board, so that the eye would be stuck in a confined space. When I work with an idea, I like to keep making variations of it until it gets to the form through which it can be best expressed. Sometimes that means pushing pieces too far in one direction, so when I vary ideas, I like to do so on a small scale. That way, if it doesn’t work, I don’t have to get too far into the process before I know. My first version of this was Milagro which has its own story. I really loved it, so it was time to start sizing up.
Even though I wanted this piece to be aggressively embellished, Hysteric still has an eye line that lets the viewer enter and exit the piece in the form of the two butterflies. The eye line runs from upper left to lower right which is also where the pill sits, keeping the piece balanced around a center line. I made a “sketch” of it so that I could still see where to place the pieces once I was in the thick of it. The base shape looks a bit like a stomach or a reversed anatomical heart.
Like the Tiny Terra, I make these embellished Glue Babies improvisationally. Meaning that, aside from a vague plan, I don’t know what they will look like when they are done. That’s fine because I can’t visualize anything anyway. These pieces are nearly as big of a surprise to me as they are to anyone else. I just gather my supplies around me and get to work. Once something is placed there’s no going back; I just have to stay in the flow state and go. It might sound strange, but it’s how I feel most comfortable working. The idea of not being able to undo anything and having to just keep moving forward feels poetic for art about illness anyway.
That’s the story behind the making of Hysteric. I hope you enjoyed it and if you like these deeper dives into pieces please let me know.
Sources and Footnotes
“Annihilation” definition from Webster’s Dictionary
Dorothea Tanning by Great Art Explained on YouTube
The Magic Flower Game by Dorothea Tanning on Sotheby’s