On the Cover:
Yese Astarloa, Comen murciélagos los gatos (detail), 2023. Bioplastics, metals, water, vapor, screens, 3D video, chains, 3D-printed pixels, crane hooks, motors, and reflective acetate, dimensions variable. Photo: Courtesy the artist.
Editor’s Letter:
For the artists featured in this issue, as for many artists working in the expanded field of sculpture, the question of what materials to explore is as urgent as how one might deploy them. Claire Barclay reframes ordinary objects by abstracting them and shifting the materials with which they’re usually made, incorporating them into installations. “Ideas of a bowl, a comb, a mirror, a wedge recur in the work in different scales, different forms, different materials, but they speak about the universality of our human experience,” she says. Failure is one of the universal human experiences that animates Cathy Della Lucia’s practice. To produce her intricately interlocking contraptions, she seeks the toughest path, combining materials “in ways that defy their properties,” writes Mallory A. Ruymann in the introduction to their fascinating conversation. “Wood carries the matte sheen of ceramics. Ceramics exhibit a plastic quality that tilts toward the machine-made.” One could say that Yese Astarloa’s work literalizes the notion, from physics, of it-from-bit, in that she aims to make the digital—her material—tangible. Many of her works, for instance, translate the movements of her computer mouse into text or traces on carbon paper or into 3D-printed plastic. Randy Polumbo also seeks to, as he puts it, “connect disparate systems,” albeit in a completely different register from Astarloa. Polumbo has recently been employing mycelium in his sculptural installations and environments, also using such various stuff as blown glass, sex toys, electronics, mirrors, upholstery, and lead crystal. Connecting the previously disconnected: this, too, seems an apt description of at least part of our mission at Sculpture. Read on, and help us complete the circuit. —Daniel Kunitz, Editor-in-Chief
