Sally Brooks Moore: Edge

ARTIST STATEMENT

Wonder and fear coexist. Sometimes, they are intertwined. We must be willing to walk toward both.

Dreams, at least the most memorable ones, often present this paradox with intriguing imagery.  We live a whole other parallel life just beneath the one we think we know.  In this foggy encoded world, struggles take place with a cast of unpredictable characters.  Old selves die as new selves emerge.  

My work has always dealt with the connection between conscious and unconscious thought/energy and how they seek to inform one another. In this body of work, I have chosen to use figures to pull out some of these dream narratives in a direct way.  While the narratives are personal, they have an archetypal draw.  One can plug in one’s own scenario and it will still be true.  We all have some version of the bear in a cage that serves as an anchor to flight. The immediacy of everyday materials, such as plywood and tire, mingle one reality with another, more fantastical and mysterious one.
 
In Where It Lives, I am thinking of the “it” as imagination, itself.  Ideas are often born in dark places. As they move toward light they go through a number of transformations, residing/taking shelter in spaces that touch the conscious world, but are not quite nameable.  In some ways, this sculpture is a battleground between selves. As I built, I found stability, kicked it away, and recreated it. A line from a Laurie Anderson song comes to mind: “This is how you can be walking, and falling, at the same time,”  … and indeed we are.  Sometimes our connection to earth is tenuous and transient, a wheel. Sometimes it is solid as cement, perhaps too weighty and sometimes it is vulnerable as a bamboo stick.

Sally B. Moore
October, 2008