If I were to build a 21st century Frankenstein I might use cardboard. First, I’m a hoarder so it’s all over my house. Second it is very malleable and easy to build upon. In this series, artist Scott Fife uses the marvelous properties of this medium to carve busts of historical and pop culture figures. The sculptures are composed of cardboard, glue, and screws.
Fife says, “I like the physical nature of building the sculpture–it seems very old-fashioned and traditional. The idea of the material itself–it’s friendly, flexible, there’s a glow from in it. I’m the full-service artist–doing it all at the moment. I like the aspect of the low-tech tools that I need to make something like this. In the beginning [it was] an X-acto knife, masking tape and glue–now it’s the screw gun. So that hasn’t changed much at all–the directness of it, that I could begin to shape this, I can make this very plastic without any special process. There is that sense of one person building this thing–it becomes a “feat”–the whole thing isn’t about that but within the world we live in right now, it makes it a kind of tribal ritual piece; the fact that it was done by the human hand. [That] takes people back to the place in their life where they remember pasting things together [and so] understanding the process.”
(cardboard-busts-by-scott-fife)
 |
