April Wright

Artist Statement

 

I use humble everyday materials in my sculptures and installations to simulate fragile moments that live in between abandonment and renewal, connecting physical and personal landscapes of home. Themes of enduring interest are ideals of domesticity, fragile narratives, empathy, and loss. In my process there remains ever present, a cyclical act of accumulating, repurposing, and building.

 

Gaston Bachelard stated that “homes are in us as much as we are in them.” My concept of home represents an ambivalence, as a space that can be supportive and nurturing, and at the same time oppressive and disorienting. Working with traditional sculpture practices in an unconventional manner allows room for new intuitive ways of making to evolve. For instance, hollow paper cinder blocks stand in for emotional boundaries, while shredded clothing found from the inside of a punching bag is gathered and bounded together to form a picket fence.

 

As an archeologist investigates underground, I investigate the home to see what ordinary materials can bring out relevance and meaning to a history or a story that is now abandoned or discarded. As a maker, I am drawn to material first, then associating and manipulating those materials into metaphors. manipulation and associations creating metaphors with those materials. Whether it be domestic, industrial, or simply discarded.