Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Bel Andrade

Untitled (you need to give me a few hours)

One of the goal of my thesis body of work is to create art objects which can cross the barrier of inaccessibility caused by the highly personal nature of my self-reflective works through the use of a manufactured animacy via the common theme and motifs of the home. In one passage of their essay Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections, Mel Y. Chen describes the “interabsorbent, interporous” qualities of laying on their sofa – how their interactions with their partner reflect the intimate relationship formed between a human and an object when our two “skins” meet, furthering the “distance in the home... (between) humans and objects who are geared not toward continuity or productivity or reproductivity but to stasis, to waiting, until it passes.” This idea of stasis in the relationship between home and body inspired my piece Untitled (you need to give me a few hours), in which a pillow cast in concrete and moulded to the shape of my head lies on my childhood mattress, depicting and representing the weeks of bedrest I endured following my mastectomy. My body is present in the work through the imprinting of my form onto the pillow, and through the collection of my skin cells on the slept-in sheets, taken from my bed in order to cross the distance between the gallery and home.