Lee Deigaard

  • WORK BY MEDIUM
    • Photography
      • Unbidden
        • Unbidden (i)
        • Unbidden (ii)
        • Sagacious Creatures
        • Horse: Nocturnal
        • Installation Trespass
        • installation views
      • Equuleus
      • Crusher Run
      • Horse: Diurnal
      • Horse: Nocturnal
      • Dirty/Pure
      • Dirty Lick
      • Embedded Lenses
      • Exploded Trees
      • Things Fall Apart
    • Photogenic Drawings
      • Encephalograms
      • Photogenic Drawings of Trees
      • Photogenic Drawings: Petri
      • Photogenic Drawings: Untitled (fluoroscopy)
      • Photogenic Drawings: Vortices III
    • Drawing/ Painting
      • Ink Drawings of Trees
      • Vortices
      • Trees
      • Drawings
    • Installation
      • One Thing Leads to Another
      • Pulse
      • Submerge
      • Crusher Run
      • Flow
      • Steady Star
      • A Tree Falls
      • Eclogue
    • Projects
      • Horses at the Museum
        • How to Invite a Horse to a Museum
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere (video)
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere [stills]
        • Field Trip
        • One Day
    • Sculpture
      • Forms
      • Hybrid Woman
      • Topsy
      • Horse and Rider
      • Heads
      • Heads
      • Heads, in the hand
      • Body
    • Video
      • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere (video)
      • Plastic Gulf
      • Steady Star
      • One Thing Leads to Another
  • WORK BY CONCEPT
    • Recent
    • Things Fall Apart
      • Things Fall Apart
      • Exploded Trees
      • A Tree Falls
    • Photogenic Drawings
      • Photogenic Drawings of Trees
      • Encephalograms
      • Photogenic Drawings: Petri
      • Photogenic Drawings: Untitled (fluoroscopy)
      • Photogenic Drawings: Vortices III
    • Animal Protagonist
      • Unbidden (i)
      • Unbidden (ii)
      • Sagacious Creatures
      • Topsy
      • Horse: Nocturnal
    • Horse
      • Equuleus
      • Horses at the Museum
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere (video)
        • Gus and Deuce Go Elsewhere [stills]
        • How to Invite a Horse to a Museum
        • Field Trip
        • One Day
      • One Thing Leads to Another
      • Horse: Diurnal
      • Horse: Nocturnal
      • Dirty/Pure
    • Topography
      • Crusher Run
      • Ink Drawings of Trees
      • Vortices
    • Moving Parts
      • Plastic Gulf
      • Steady Star
    • Body/Corporal
      • Equuleus
      • Forms
      • Hybrid Woman
      • Dirty Lick
      • Dirty/Pure
      • Horse and Rider
      • Body
      • Heads
      • Heads
      • Heads, in the hand
    • Forensic
      • Exploded Trees
      • Embedded Lenses
    • Textual
      • Dirty/Pure
    • Immersive
      • Pulse
      • Steady Star
      • Submerge
      • Flow
  • CURATE/COLLAB
    • Latin for Crab
    • PhotoBOMB
    • Standing Heat
    • You Beautiful Bitch
    • Animal Proximity
    • Sfumato
    • at The Front
  • INFO
  • WRITING
    • Encephalograms
    • Topsy Memorial
    • Forms
    • Photogenic Drawings
    • Hybrid Woman
    • Trees
    • a tree falls
    • Writing: Statmob
  • NEWS

Artist Statement: Endo/Exo Skeleton

Forms are investigations into saddle surfaces and other topographies and were conceived as ways of bouncing light across and through surfaces. They are improvisations in form.

They reference vertebrae, spinal columns, ribcages, and corsets.

They are under tension but they encase air.

Their surfaces are defined by their support structures.

The sewn edges on some suggest sutures and operative scars.   Some hang on the wall, some are suspended, and others rest on flat surfaces.

Some appear to rely on a central spine, others on variations of ribcages.

 

My early sculptural training began with the study of bones, specifically an elephant’s femur and a rhinoceros’ humerus. These bones taught me about topography and abstract surfaces. Their edges receded into planes; their concavities articulated into protrusions. We studied their anatomy as if they were landscapes.

Such bones are the ultimate armatures. Their surfaces are informed by their structural roles; the bones flare broadly at their ends where, meeting other bones, they support the movement and postures of multi-ton creatures.

Recently, when I was recovering from a spinal injury and the subsequent surgery, I reflected again on bones and skeletal structures and their soft articulating junctures. Failed for a time by the skeletal support of my spinal column, in order to keep working, I needed to make lightweight pieces I could work on while lying down.

Like writing in verse with metric or syllabic restrictions, my damaged spine set parameters of size and weight for the sculptures I made.

The pain prior to surgery was of the intensity to break a person. Even breathing focused me wholly in the moment, and I became aware of inhalation as an exercise in tension.   Being physically frail, confined indoors, and breathing with pain turned my thoughts inevitably to women’s corsets. I thought about seemingly insubstantial volumes of air bursting at their seams.

 

Confined to bed, I thought frequently about light and space: light in its dual meanings of weightlessness and illumination.   I thought about interior volumes opened up to allow the passage of light and air within. I envisioned armatures pressing against outer surfaces, such a skeleton describing form (rather than inflicting form) as much as it supports it against gravity. The armatures within these Forms have their own joints and like knuckles or kneecaps, these joints appear as points of suspension under the skin.

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LEE DEIGAARD © 2023, All Rights Reserved.