Description
Back & Forth is comprised of two sculptural elements, both made of hand-made cast-paper: a torso and a set of folded hands. The artist used plaster and clay to make the molds from her own body.
A photo-lithograph is integrated into the paper torso. A juxtaposition of several elements dominate the imagery: a stylized female figure rising out of a black and white reproduction of a detail from the 1818–19 painting The Raft of the Medusa by French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault. A cut-out reproduction of a newspaper article about “massenverdummung” ( the dumbing of the masses) sits in a stylized image of a boat. These elements are framed in a pointed arch shape, which acts like a window into the torso. The cast-paper surface of the torso is worked with oil stick and acrylic paint.
Statement
Back & Forth questions the Modernist ideal of progress and proposes a visceral response to what I see as the often futile motion of history and society—an endless to-and-fro.
In the eighties, I created a number of works with folded hands. They referred both to the Grimm fairy tale The Girl Without Hands and historic paintings and photographs of women portrayed with their hands folded on their laps. In both cases, hands—symbols of action and autonomy—are violently stripped away, robbed of agency by patriarchal structures and technological advances. My project was to reclaim those hands.
Karen Trask & Don Goodes, 2024