Fifteenth Uncomformity

By: Lydia Musco

Completed

2024

Medium

Integrally pigmented hand cast concrete

Dimensions

69.5 x 20 x 13"

Cost

$27,000

Description

I learned to observe the world from my poet mother and from my grandfathers who performed magic tricks and asked expert questions. I learned to work with my hands from my woodworker father and my grandmothers who cooked Sicilian delicacies and played piano duets. From them I learned the power of working deeply into whatever boundaries are encountered and the immense, unexpected creative territory that is revealed when choices are limited. For the past sixteen years I have limited my building materials primarily to concrete and whatever is needed to support it (such as wood and metal for forming). I began using concrete for its relationship to architecture, its fundamental connection to our built environment, for the fact that it can be a blob of mud or made into a highly polished surface, and for its ubiquity in the world. This material allows me to mold, cast, carve, pour, drill – to build up or break down - with minimal tools and equipment. In its simplicity and ubiquity, the material allows me to focus on being honest with what I make and, as I try to interpret how I see and experience the world, to slowly discover how to control the complexity of the objects. The concrete sculptures are built from the ground up, in one continuous action. This process mirrors my experience of moving through time - the accumulation of memories and events - and my interpretation of the landscape, with its slow building up of growth and geologic material. The sculptures are cast in moveable layers that disassemble and reassemble like a vertically stacked puzzle. They can be deconstructed, transported, and reconstructed by hand, by one person. Each reassembly of a piece echoes the actions of its original making process and is, at the same time, recreated in a new time, a new environment, and with new intention. The Unconformity series, a collection of hand-cast, integrally pigmented concrete sculptures, has been developing since early 2020. As this series has evolved, these pieces began to reflect my immediate environment, one that I’d begun to take for granted. I began looking more intentionally and more closely at the landscape of this small spot in the woods of Massachusetts where I live and work. In an attempt to not take any bit of time for granted I have been making drawings and notes of the incremental environmental changes that accumulate into weeks and months and years, using these as studies for new works. In its current iteration this series of sculptures is my interpretation of a landscape – light, color, form, growth, erosion - as it changes through time, along with ongoing questions of my own relationship to the passage and documentation of time. Making helps me understand the world and gives me hope. Making helps me learn how things go together, how things come apart, how they stand, how they fall, how they interact, and helps me to see the world. There is so much to learn; I treasure every scrap of understanding I can get.

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