Downtrodden Sculpture

Downtrodden was part of a solo show titled Within Me, Beyond Me I held at Artika Gallery in Helsinki in 2016. The working title for this piece was Crawler mainly because I worked on this piece the other way around. It was only until I flipped it on its back that I was able to resolve the issues with this piece. The main focus for the pieces in this show was the idea of human being trapped under a white sheet of fabric. The shapes are somewhat abstract, but their origin comes from the human body. Downtrodden is lying on her back and her shape is both intimate and yet protective. Here is the description of the show: Within Me, Beyond Me presents the world of trauma via a series of sculptures. Abstract figures full of tension with their tendons poised to snap have frozen in place, almost as if to hold down a world that seemed to be bending and breaking apart. That world has now long since moved on and yet these shapes lie still. They are stuck in a fractured moment like a memory that was carved out with a kitchen knife and in their place only gaps in narrative and emptiness. This exhibition is a portrait gallery of such moments when all control is lost and suddenly our resistance is broken through. A quick gasp of air marks and colours a moment more significant and hurtful than any wound on the body that bleeds. You are invited into limbo: a forgotten landscape of tensified, contorted and petrified emotion. A place neither here or there, where you might come face to face with something all too familiar and yet abstract. Slowly.. very, very slowly, within all the stillness, the ice thaws and wounded souls heal. “I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” From Elm by Sylvia Plath Plinth recommendation: 100cm x 85cm x 50cm colour: black