Gwendolyn Arthur

You can only truly experience Gwendolyn Arthur's art by running your hands over it. The bones are smooth and cool to the touch like marble. Touching the bones, one gets a sense of the dense process of creation that makes these figures so haunting and beautiful. Each bone has been formed from multiple layers of papier maché, paint, lacquer. After applying each layer, she sands the bones down by hand. Shape. Sand. Paint. Polish. Shape. Sand. Paint. Polish. Over and over, applying at least 12 layers into the bones. The arduous, sometimes painful process does to her creations what time and experience do to a human life. She builds the structure, gives it shape, makes it grow. And then she wears it down, scraping through the epidermal layers to reveal the history beneath the surface.  The colors that would otherwise be hidden in the shell are revealed instead of added. They emerge through the erosion of time directed by the artist herself. Each figure then, contains within it a history.