Gwen L Kelling

     “Industries thrive on modifying the architecture of the senses - augmenting our apertures, or making them more discrete as need be…the architecture of the body is not simply something to behold, but rather something to analyze and explore from the inside out.”​

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-Madeline Schwartzman, Seeing Yourself Sensing*

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     “Capacity manifests its power as potentiality, incipience, and imminence. Only when exercised do capacities become fully apparent...transgender capacity is the ability or potential for making visible, bringing into experience, or knowing genders as mutable, successive, and multiple.”

-David Getsy, Abstract Bodies**  

 

 

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     The discipline of sculpture is uniquely equipped to reimagine who and what can hold space in our minds and environments. To practice sculpture is to formulate the visual vocabulary of one’s identity and to assert it through extensions into the physical world. A sculpture resists marginalization by its sheer solidity and durability. When a sculptor imbues their experiences and messaging into a legible three-dimensional form, they are staking a persistent claim in the collective consciousness that cannot be drowned out or deleted.

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     With the rise of smart medical devices, surgical beautification, virtual reality and machine learning, the boundaries between body, mind and machine are constantly being eroded. We are merging our senses and physiologies with ever-evolving technological augmentations, sometimes cautiously and sometimes eagerly. The expectations of what our bodies can look like and accomplish will always be subject to change. I sculpt biomechanical hybrids to describe my effort to harness my own endocrinology for its power to heal and transmute my body. This intimate undertaking is compounded by the encroachment of socio-political mechanisms which control gender expression and attack queerness. I contend that these abstract systems of violence and the transgender body hold equal capacity for major overhaul, restoration and reinvention. Through my artwork, I conceptualize my body as an amalgamation of mutable parts and potentials that obfuscate a binary enforcement of gender. I challenge the conventional gender binary, and my own womanhood within it, as amalgamations of arbitrary barriers that impede personal growth and interpersonal vulnerability.

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     Our bodies have become battlegrounds for corporate profiteering and political agendas. Misconceptions become laws, exacting real-world consequences upon people of marginalized communities, especially those at the intersections of generational poverty, racism, and political obstruction. By manifesting the factional cruelty of these social apparatuses through the cold calculations of actual machinery, my work provides audiences with a means to investigate the inner workings of our systemic constraints and to address them as inventors, repairers or saboteurs.

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