Wings

mixed-media, 2011-2014

Between 2011 and 2014 I created around 600 objects inspired by chicken wings. In this craft-intensive series, I explored bronze and aluminum casting, ceramics, cement and paper.

Chicken wings come from the one of the most abused animals on the planet. We know their anatomy well. Bronze adds weight to this guilty pleasure, as well as some material value to one of the market’s cheapest meats. The choice of a risen chicken wing as an iconic object, as well as its obsessive repetition, came from a research on violence in the works of Georges Bataille and Slavoj Zizek. When violence is assimilated to one’s daily routine it becomes systematic and invisible. In the "Sublime Object of Ideology" Zizek asks: “…aren't the different attempts to attach this phenomenon (concentration camps) to a concrete image, to reduce it to a product of a concrete social order, (...) attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the 'real' of our civilization, which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems?” I’d say yes Zizek, they are. Violence is in our plates every day. What does that mean for us?

Ceramics offered infinite possibilities of color and texture. I mixed my porcelain slip and glazes from scratch and experimented with different glaze recipes and combinations, as well as different firing techniques.

The cement wings were much larger, based on a hand-sculpted clay original.

In 2013 The cement wings were installed at the Wentworth Park in downtown Lansing, Michigan, as part of an exhibit by the Lansing Art Gallery.