Resilience II
Object or Organism
Elongated Emptiness
In considering the fact that death is a natural part of the organic experience, I also sought to express its opposite; birth. This direction led me to create delicately and intricately adorned egg sculptures that use the form as a foundation to explore the source of life and its fragility, the glory of its prime, and its inevitable termination which places all organic beings in a consistent state of decay. In my work, flies represent this notion, while bees are their symbolic foil, expressing hope and life because of their natural roles as pollinators.
Between Realms
Photos from the opening of Elegant Emptiness at Swarthmore College’s List Gallery
Another great article featuring my work in the Swarthmore College List Gallery Senior Exhibition Series
Alex Anderson ’13, opened yesterday, April 25, and will be up through April 29. Anderson’s pieces are uniformly elegant, ranging from streamlined beauty to more complex and gilded pieces. One dark, glistening vase serves as a platform for a small ceramic bird, lying on its back with its delicate legs sticking straight up. Others incorporate fragile-looking flower petals or tendrils. Anderson describes his work as moving slowly away from functional sculpture and dealing with themes of “mortality, decay, and ephemeral beauty.” He cites 16th century Dutch still-life paintings and a recent trip to China as influences. He credits vanitas paintings, which he first encountered in his Western Art course, as contributing to his fascinating with “the fleeting nature of life.” For Anderson, “The fact that you can have all these beautiful things in life, but you can’t take them with you” is an eternal conundrum worth exploring. “There’s so much that you can say with an image or an object that words cannot necessarily express,” he said.
