Artist: Melanie Irwin

Title: Surface Tension  作品名称： 表面的张力

Material: Furniture borrowed from XLY MoMA, found objects, textiles, bamboo, pins, twine, chalk marker  

材质：许燎源美术馆家具，意外发现物件，纺织品，竹子，钉，绳带，粉笔马克笔

Size: Variable  尺寸：可变尺寸

Year: 2013   创作时间：2013

Using sculpture, drawing, performance and photography, my work addresses the complexities of relations between urban bodies, objects and structures. Through post-minimalist, provisional and performative gestures, I aim to provide new possibilities for thinking about the effects of architecture, infrastructure and the accumulation of objects in the urban setting on our experience of space and our connections to site, to objects and to other bodies.

I use commonplace materials and salvaged objects to explore notions of structure, compression, distortion and elasticity. Recent sculptures have referenced bodily surfaces (such as the membrane), which I combine with rigid structures, generating points of protrusion and tension, containment and distension.

I examine the ways in which bodies are contained by the constructed geometric forms of the post-industrial built environment and the effects of this containment on our bodies and our psyches. I blur the boundaries between drawing, sculpture and performance when my process incorporates my own active body or the active bodies of participants into the work, engaging public spaces through minimalist performative interventions and trajectories. Systematic processes provide a structure for me to work with, resulting in absurd and humorous actions where my body is sometimes put at some risk. This physicality provides a space for the viewer to identify with me or with my materials empathetically in a momentary transgression of physical boundaries, a real-time reshaping of subjectivity.

我的作品结合雕塑、绘画、表演以及摄影，强调都市身体、物体与结构之间的复杂关系。我运用后极简艺术派，临时与表演手势，意图为思考建筑、基础设施以及都市设施中物体的聚合的效应提供新的可能性，这些效应影响了我们关于空间的经验，对地点、物体和我们身体的联系。

我运用了极其平凡的材料及回收利用设施，探索结构、压缩、扭曲与弹性的原则。新制成的雕塑涉及到整体表层（比如膜）。在作品中，我结合了刚硬材料、伸出与拉紧，限制与膨胀的发生点。

通过后工业环境的几何形式，对身体与心灵的牵制效应，我验证了承载身体的几个方式。在与自己的身体以及作品参与者身体相联系的过程中，我模糊了绘画、雕塑与表演的界限，通过极简主义的表演干涉与轨迹，进入到公共空间。循序渐进的过程，提供了一个工作的框架，引发了将我的身体置于危险中的荒谬与幽默行为。这一肢体性给观看者带来了空间，在对身体边界的暂时超越，及对主体性的实时重塑中，验证我或者我的材料。