eve ingalls

 

running straight to her website after yuanman found her exhibit in soho – these images are exactly the kinds of things i was hoping to emulate – this energized form coming from the ground. 

——eve explaining her work:

During a residency in Berlin I turned to Sculpture. It allowed for a more direct investigation of our interaction with the natural world than painting could offer. Urbanization is stripping us of our awareness of natural habitat. While working in the studio, I imagined that the natural world was gone-erased-except for the bit of landscape left at the edge of my body (perched on my shoulder, caught between my arms, or stuck in the triangle that holds my feet to the ground). Using my body as a drawing tool, I recorded in gypsum the gestures which allow me to reach out and bring back a world in which it is possible to exist. These are primarily gestures seeking shelter and orientation.

Currently I use both paper and metal for their ability to record the intricate effects of wear and tear on the cultural and natural fabric of our contemporary world. Among these effects are the boundary shifts that are being caused by global warming. Entire sections where form once existed feel erased, burnt, or gnawed away. The remains evoke parts of the human body and elements of the nature/culture battle that seek to survive destructive forces. References to the human body and to human scale unite to produce the unsettling effect of implicating a part of the viewer’s body in the survival effort that is being enacted in each sculpture. It is as if a part of one’s body is being used without one’s consent.Throughout the papermaking process I set up conditions that mirror natural forces. Pulp and water are allowed to participate actively in the shaping of the paper. For example, I often let the drying paper twist the internal metal rods on which the paper is supported, much as the drying out of the cells of a dead tree causes its trunk to spiral in one direction. The active collaboration of the process brings a sense of added life to the work, by making forms feel as if they are pinched and pulled and moving before oneÕs eyes. The result is the impression that an event is in process of unfolding, forcing each sculpture to change location, structure, and shape. I intend my sculpture to feel uncomfortable, as if it has come from another place and is merely passing through the gallery on its way elsewhere. Wishful Filaments (a play on Freud’s dreams of ‘wish fulfillment’) suggests an accordion book that is pried loose from the earth, stretched open, and held up to the sky by marionette wires. It forms a stairway that allows the thought of flight along a vertical axis.My sculpture is also charged with ironic humor and narrative twists and turns. In A ‘Quick’ History of the Western World, a tablecloth-like piece of handmade paper serves as a draped stage space. It is inhabited by a group of figures that simultaneously evoke ancient Greek philosophers engaged in dialogue, biblical prophets addressing believers, and soldiers preparing to charge. These three narrative strands confront each ‘ther, diverge, and rejoin to suggest that the implications of what seem to be ‘facts on the ground’ can be painfully clear as well as exceedingly elusive and complex.

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