Across a four-decade-long career, Isabelle Plat has upended art genres addressing people, places, and things by (re)constructing and (re)assembling familiar materials and then inviting viewers to interact with them. She calls these works sculpture d’usage (“usable sculpture”), but metaphor runs riot as this Parisian artist channels the stuff of everyday life into art.
Out of Very Little: A Conversation with Helen O’Leary
An artist of shreds, remainders, and lost objects, Helen O’Leary, like the great memoirist Joseph Cornell, infuses scraps of the forgotten and overlooked with the poetry of recognition. Channeling the latent energy concealed in wood fragments, scraps of fabric, and pigments, she translates detritus into objects that bear the aura of previous lives.
Sculpture Makes the Space: A Conversation with Didier Vermeiren
For nearly five decades, Didier Vermeiren has been producing works that deal with sculpture’s long-term subordinate—the plinth. His approach, which is rigorous, investigative, and hinges on traditional materials and processes, involves exploring structure, placement, distribution, and links with the history of sculpture.
Beautiful Returns: A Conversation with Amanda Williams
Artist and architect Amanda Williams grew up in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. On a map produced by the federally sanctioned Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), this area was colored red, designating residents as ineligible to receive federal housing loans—a discriminatory, racially motivated practice known as “redlining.”
We Have Always Been Here: A Conversation with Jonathan Baldock
Baldock’s interests are rooted in the unseen, places where myth manifests itself. “Touch Wood,” his current exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Weston Gallery, draws on beliefs and rituals that have brought people together from time immemorial.
Like a Sculpture: A Conversation with Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto makes little distinction between the two- and three-dimensional. Photography, sculpture, and architecture are all part of his project to find “a creation of human consciousness.”
Courting Contradiction: A Conversation with Catalina Ouyang
Engaging critically with precarity, power, and history, Catalina Ouyang challenges images, image-making, material assumptions, and dominant narratives with humility as well as deep visceral and theoretical conviction. Rather than signaling finite meaning, their sculptures engage the flow and erosion of ideas and intensities harbored in any constellation of things.
Archetypal Things: A Conversation with Martin Boyce
Scottish artist Martin Boyce draws on the imagery of everyday urban living to create sculptural and wall-based works that conflate and confuse notions of exterior and interior, natural and manufactured.
Lift and Fold: A Conversation with Mimi Herbert
Mimi Herbert and her fraternal twin were only 12 when their father, a portrait photographer, paid them a quarter a head to tint his sepia prints with oils. Their mother had studied at Pratt, and an uncle, a New York artist, marched them through museums with pictures that gave Herbert nightmares.
La trama de la memoria colectiva: Una Conversación con Claudia Santanera
Nacida en la provincia de Córdoba, Argentina, la poeta y artista visual Claudia Santanera se vincula con el campo de los cruces interdisciplinarios desarrollando su obra en diferentes soportes y medios que van desde las video instalaciones hasta las esculturas blandas trabajadas con fibras naturales, pasando por los libros de poesía.
