What Can You Swallow that Can Also Swallow You?
Lauren Wilcox Puchowski
I’m often looking at the material intersection of humans and the rest of the world, the objects that are produced by nature and claimed by people, or produced by people and claimed by nature. Sometimes I feel like I am witnessing a conversation of sorts, or maybe a marking of territory by rival gangs. Either way, the objects become greater, more vulnerable, more monumental, as each side makes its marks. In these works I want to capture that new identity, to boil it down, to turn it into a sign, or a totem or talisman. I think that the resulting work fits into a historical continuum of small objects people have always made, folk or traditional, that are powered equally by material concerns, private narratives and visual shorthands. These particular pieces feel like the beginning of something more complicated, conceptually as well as compositionally, a way to ease into compound arrangements, like players on a game board, animating ideas in space.
Lauren Wilcox Puchowski
Lauren Wilcox Puchowski grew up in Durham, NC. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida and has published work in the Paris Review, the Antioch Review, The Oxford American and the Washington Post Magazine, among others. She has shown her sculpture in galleries in Brooklyn, Arkansas, Jersey City, and on Governor's Island in New York City. Her work is in the collections of the Arkansas Art Museum and the Historical Museum of Arkansas. She also does illustrations and writing for Heifer International, an international nonprofit working to end poverty in developing countries by encouraging gender equity and small-scale farming. She lives in Jersey City, NJ with her family. Learn more at laurenpuchowski.com.