Artist Kate Clark says there are many compelling reasons for the title of her exhibit, “Give and Take.”
“The most straightforward reason is that in the sculptures I take away an animal’s natural facial features and give that animal human facial features,” she says via e-mail. “I’d like to emphasize that ‘Give and Take,’ as an expression, can mean that there is compromise and shared benefits.
“This is an intellectual discussion that I like to have around the work: Would an animal benefit from having ‘readable’ human facial features, and potentially a human mind? What would he, in this position, think about our artificial lifestyles and the current state of our ‘civilized’ society?”
The expression “give and take” also can refer to communication, the artist says, “an active exchange of ideas.”
“The strongest separation between man and animal is the language barrier,” Clark says. “By creating human features, the animal is able to communicate, at least visually through his face, which allows for a stronger understanding between man and animal.”
Clark’s large-scale sculptures, currently on view at the Mobile Museum of Art, was organized by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York City, with the artist’s assistance for the Mobile Museum of Art.
The exhibit features four full-bodied animal sculptures and two wall sculptures. One sculpture titled “Lit from Within”, was created last year for a show called “Pretty Tough, Contemporary Storytelling” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. The piece shows three delicate gazelles, all turned to face the viewer with a powerful gaze.
The other sculptures were created for the Mobile exhibit including one with two white Canadian wolves.
“Initially this piece looks like a romance between male and female,” Clark says, “but in fact the piece is titled ‘Bully’ as the female is positioned in a dominant stance with a stern expression, and the male is below her with his ears turned back.”
The other standing sculptures are a black ram and a baby bison; wall sculptures are a white ram and a pair of deer.
“The double deer sculpture is titled ‘Preoccupied,’” the artist explains. “They too look like a romantic pair, as she hangs upside down around him and they touch cheeks. But the romance is lost since they are clearly thinking about other things and not about each other.”
The artwork is a synthesis of human and animal, their faces revealing safety, gentility and cultivation. However, as a museum news release states, “seams in her sculpture remind the viewer that the exotic and wild has been undone to construct these striking portraits.”
“The artist asks us to embrace contradiction and question man’s uncertain relationship with an underlying violence sheathed just beneath a guise of control.”
In his 1998 book “Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness,” Ian Tattersal wrote that human features have evolved into a smooth-skinned, hairless face that reveals a range of universally understood expressions: outrage, fear, sympathy and the subtlest of emotions. This has helped humankind create a civilized culture based on trust in others, the author notes.
Clark’s sculpture’s of sympathetic faces tinged with anger, regret or seductiveness, question what it is to be human.
“I create sculptures that are natural animal bodies with faces that have been transformed to have human facial features,” Clark says. “The sculptures present the viewer with the human face, which they relate to, the animal body, with which they reject a relationship, and finally the fusion of these two parallel but distinctly different lives.”
The artist begins her sculptures by traditionally mounting the hide of the animal’s body. She then cuts and stitches the leather skin of the animal’s face over soft clay, sculpting the features under the skin to create a smooth transition of animal body into human face.
“I pin along the stitching to hold the drying leather together, while also exaggerating the visible seams,” she says. “These seams emphasize the brutality of reconstruction while the final portraits are refined to reveal consciousness, emotion and experience.”
Clark says she has always been interested in “transformation” as a concept — “taking something and changing it, and then discussing the outcome. I am an animal lover but I use animal hide because it is important to my concept: The animals are transformed to have human and ‘readable’ features, using their original facial skin. The viewer can see that this is the leather of the animal and relate to the recognizable, oily, porous features.”
She says her use of non-traditional materials helps add curiosity for the viewer, which encourages further questions and a better understanding of the work.
“One demand that I have when I’m looking at artwork is that it’s visually powerful,” she says. “I am very interested in creating an intellectual discussion around my artwork, but initially I’d like the viewer to have a strong gut reaction, a primal reaction.”
Clark says she has been working with the concepts of transformation and expression since she started graduate school.
“I started the series with taxidermy in 2001 for my thesis show at Cranbrook Academy of Art,” she says. “The original work was rudimentary. It has taken me many years to develop my skill with leather and my skill with portraiture to allow me to control the narrative and power of these sculptures.”
Clark is delighted that her artwork usually elicits strong responses.
“It’s not always a positive response,” she says, “and some people simply won’t even approach it. But I also get very positive feedback and interest in my work. I have had people relate to it in very personal ways, from an interest in mythology to science fiction to environmental issues.
“Generally people want to discuss their human condition and a suppressed knowledge (and) understanding that they should be aware of the larger world around them.
“I try to be very clear in the work and in what I say about the work,” Clark says, “that it is about a necessary balance between man and animal and not about the hierarchy of man over animal.”
WHAT: Claudia DeMonte: Mapping Beauty," and "Kate Clark: Give and Take"
WHEN: through July 11
WHERE: Mobile Museum of Art in Langan Park, west Mobile
NOTE: DeMonte's artwork includes painted pulp/paper sculptures, works in clay, photography installations, bronze and pewter milagros nailed onto wooden sculptures. Clark's new, large-scale sculptures explore the margins between myth and reality. The museum also is showing "Shoot'n Southern: Women Photographers Past and Present," through July 18.
HOURS: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday; 1-5 p.m. Sunday
ADMISSION: $10 adults; $6 students
INFO: 251-208-5200 or Web: www.mobilemuseumofart.com