Eve Ingalls

I use both paper and metal for their ability to record the intricate effects of wear and tear on the cultural and natural fabric of our contemporary world. Many of the surfaces are scarred and pitted.  Entire sections where form once existed feel erased, burnt, or gnawed away.  The remains evoke desiccated wings as well as parts of the human body and elements of nature that have survived destructive forces.   References to the human body and to human scale unite to produce the unsettling effect of implicating a part of the viewer’s body in the survival effort that  is being enacted in each sculpture.  It is as if a part of one’s body is being used without one’s consent.                          

My sculpture is also charged with ironic humor and narrative twists and turns. In A ‘Quick’ History of the Western World, a tablecloth-like piece of handmade paper serves as a draped stage space. It is inhabited by a group of figures that simultaneously evoke ancient Greek philosophers engaged in dialogue, biblical prophets addressing believers, and soldiers preparing to charge. These three narrative strands confront each other, diverge, and rejoin to suggest that the implications of facts on the ground can be painfully clear as well as exceedingly elusive and complex.

I intend my sculpture to feel uncomfortable, as if it has come from another place and is merely passing through the gallery on its way elsewhere. Wishful Filaments (a play on Freud’s dreams of ‘wish fulfillment’) suggests an accordion book that is pried loose from the earth, stretched open, and held up to the sky by marionette wires.  It forms a stairway that allows the thought of flight along a vertical axis. Empire on Course consists of four large topographic mappings, each of which appears to have been torn from the earth’s surface and set in motion to hover and slide down the gallery walls. Empire on Course is a dialogue with Ed Ruscha’s and Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire. Here, as in all of my work, one is witness to unexpected swerves in the implied narrative. I feel like the loving shepherd of a wayward flock of narratives. All is not doomsday. These wayward narratives allow creative space in which to redirect the implications of facts on the ground.

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