Cute... or sinister?

The hand carved wooden elephants we got from Liz Armitage were your typical gift shop inhabitants, either in a zoo or park of some kind, or brought home from a trip abroad of course. They had been a present, but although surely well intended, she never took to them. -They are ugly, and their eyes are scary! she claimed, and after a quick inspection I had to give her right. Could it be that the loveless conditions under which they had been carved, in some third world craft industry aimed at tourists, had infused itself into the core of the creatures created there? Anyway, they were justly deemed too creepy for the bookshelf. But instead of trying to erase the elephants unwholesome attitudes, I decided to run with it.

A definite improvement of the creepy eyes.

Making a small sculpture that is genuinely unsettling is actually really difficult, so when you happen to run into one where half the job has already been done, surely you would only want to enhance it. I figured if I transformed the figure from representing an animal beloved and sought out by tourists in the tropics, into one westerners going south mostly try to avoid, I might be on the right track.

Is it the name of a large spider, or an eight legged elephant?

I wanted to keep as much of the hand carved aesthetic as possible, so I just cut the spider body out of the elephant, and then added three extra pairs of legs. The symbolical implications of an elephant spider are interesting for me. Think of the renowned memory of the elephant, his size and majesty, and how they live to very old age. And then the shadow existence of spiders, hiding out in nooks and crannies, staying out of plain view, waiting patiently for its prey, ubiquitous to any environment, always hiding in some shadow of human habitation. Sounds a bit like guilt maybe, or family secrets.

What's the secret of the Elephant Spider?

As a sculpture it is also interesting. Is a carving like this a representation of an imaginary animal, or of tourist handicraft? Or is it a symbolical representation of a power relationship or economical force that were behind the creation of the carving in the first place? I think it can inhabit several of these positions at the same time, but I also think that a figurative sculpture like this points at the complex of an art world sometimes uncomfortable with simple figuration, in a world full of non artistic figurative sculpture and imagery, in toys, media and advertising.

If you catch her scuttling over your bathroom floor at night, maybe a rolled up newspaper won't be enough?

Object no. 24

Stacked up normality.

The brief for the Steffi family was to warp it’s annoying normality. Sally Andrews, an art student of the ECA, had bought it with the intention of making an artwork that, if I understood it correctly, challenged the normative family values projected by the doll kit. The way I interpreted our discussion, Sally was mostly annoyed with the hetero normative message propagated by the Steffi’s, but the whole idea of the perfect American middle class family got me thinking, and I decided I was more interested in the class side of the American norm. So, in my interpretation, the Steffi family are victims of one of the 3.2 million foreclosures in the States last year. They are all ready and willing to work, not on drugs, or disabled, or even war veterans with post traumatic stress syndromes, just very normal, blond, fit and average people who lost their job in the crisis, then their home, and that now are moving (at least trying to) West, for better opportunities.

You would pick them up, wouldn't you?

Object no. 63

We think...it's for carrying something delicate.

We don’t really know what this box is, who made it or why. Ms Johnson, who had picked it up at a flea market in Canada, thought it might have been a home-made instrument box. It could well be. The outer shell of the old and battered suitcase is made of tin and was obviously bought be someone who then fitted it with a wooden panelling in a style you would expect to find in a seventies bathroom. After a bit of thinking and tinkering we decided that the panelling was also lined with Styrofoam insulation, to keep the contents of the suitcase warm and cozy.

The trick is to keep the mouse occupied while traveling.

The reason this object was difficult to re-fit into an art object, is that it has already been remade from its original form. When someone sees my final sculpture, they will most likely assume that I also installed the wooden panelling, why not, given it’s such an odd addition. My response to this presumed assumption was to attach an invented story to the suitcase, that would both answer the initial question of what the wooden panelling was for, but also add several new layers of open ended questions.

A good instruction should always add more question marks than it adresses.

When an artwork is functional, I prefer it if the aesthetic choices are kept simple, and the perceived or real functionality of the object is made to carry both the obvious narrative of the piece, as well as a number of implied layers. That way, when someone engages with the object, they first think aha, so that’s what it’s for, but then also start trying to pick apart a number of mysteries and oddities that are implied given the up-front purpose of the artwork combined with how it would actually perform, and most importantly, what kind of world we would be living in if the object was actually a real and not an imaginary construct.

Object no. 34