A conversation between Mrs. Pliking and Olunde
Seeds of Passage is an exhibition of sculptural ensembles I have created with found-objects, musing the Nobel Prize-winning play, Death and the Horsemen, by Wole Soyinka. The play is based on the incident that took place in 1946 in the western region of Nigeria when the cosmological traditions of a colonizing power clashed with those of the indigenous culture. I use found (repurposed) objects to create many of my works. Three primary concepts guide my work: 1) latent energy - the memory or accumulative consciousness of the object, 2) the Sieving Process - the selection of individual parts from the local cache of materials, and 3) the pervasiveness of the material. Influenced by objects found in my late mother's collection in 1993, I have designed sculptural forms to bubble in latent energy and to emphasize subject area relationships between theatre and the visual arts; used found-object in exploring the cycle-of-objects; objects-to geographic location-to social class-to sculptural form-to collective object and the wooden palette-plinths symbolize the cyclic nature of the found-object. Gestured forms in each subject pose of the collection are designed to be as telling as objects for aesthetic pleasure and, more importantly, educational resources for viewers. I argue that found-objects are repurposed materials and thus are essential elements of the organization of my sculptural form.
The two figures are in dialogue despite the cultural distance existing in the pose of the two sculptures but connected by the repurposed wood and books.
Seeds of Passage is an exhibition of sculptural ensembles I have created with found-objects, musing the Nobel Prize-winning play, Death and the Horsemen, by Wole Soyinka. The play is based on the incident that took place in 1946 in the western region of Nigeria when the cosmological traditions of a colonizing power clashed with those of the indigenous culture. I use found (repurposed) objects to create many of my works. Three primary concepts guide my work: 1) latent energy - the memory or accumulative consciousness of the object, 2) the Sieving Process - the selection of individual parts from the local cache of materials, and 3) the pervasiveness of the material. Influenced by objects found in my late mother's collection in 1993, I have designed sculptural forms to bubble in latent energy and to emphasize subject area relationships between theatre and the visual arts; used found-object in exploring the cycle-of-objects; objects-to geographic location-to social class-to sculptural form-to collective object and the wooden palette-plinths symbolize the cyclic nature of the found-object. Gestured forms in each subject pose of the collection are designed to be as telling as objects for aesthetic pleasure and, more importantly, educational resources for viewers. I argue that found-objects are repurposed materials and thus are essential elements of the organization of my sculptural form. The two figures are in dialogue despite the cultural distance existing in the pose of the two sculptures but connected by the repurposed wood and books.