This week we had a cohort discussion about Interpretation: how does the artist attribute meaning and intentions to their artwork, and will a viewer be able to interpret these? Each of us presented a piece of work for group discussion around whether our intention for the work would be clear to the audience.
The piece I chose to show is this prototype of a sculpture:
My intention behind this piece – as is the case with the previous gold sculpture that I presented to the cohort – is a commentary around species (all species, whether plant, insect, sea creature or mammal, etc.) through the lens of evolutionary theory, illustrating that features and traits we see today, handed down via decent with modification, are quite arbitrary. This goes against the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ – one of the most misunderstood and misconstrued concepts in evolutionary theory.
If we were the ‘fittest’ versions of ourselves, we would have no redundancies e.g. human babies in vitro can be seen to have rudimentary gills that subsequently get reabsorbed before birth, or male mammals having nipples despite not being the ones that breastfeed the offspring.
These figures present an alternative composition of assemblages in order to depict an alternative to the way species look today – species could look and function in many other ways than the way they do today.
I cannot think that a viewer of this work could ever even guess that that’s what I’m trying to say with this piece, so I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me in terms of thinking about communication and interpretation. For starters, this piece is not intended as a stand alone piece. As discussed in my recent tutorial session, this piece would be placed inside an alternate world with other assemblage creatures around it, something similar to the world presented in my painting entitled ‘Held in Suspension’.
Debbie New 