The artist Rebecca Manson invites viewers to “Come Closer and the View Gets Wilder” with her new art installation in Tribeca Park (NYC).
The work is composed of thousands of ceramic bone-like pieces. The sculpture invites viewers, once seeing it from a distance as a big textured globe, to look closer at the many tiny parts that make up the whole.
REBECCA MANSON
Come Closer and the View Gets Wider, 2016
Porcelain, epoxy, glaze, aluminum, steel
93 × 93 × 110 in (236.2 × 236.2 × 279.4 cm)
“Mostly, I just want people to take in the idea of all these little things that are insignificant on their own coming together to make something really powerful and strong,” the Brooklyn-based artist, 29, said of her first public work. But it is also, she said, a metaphor for community, “and it being a globe is about caring for the planet and everyone uniting.”
The piece, conceived four years ago, took a year to come together and for six weeks alone, Manson said, she was tearing off bits of clay and would “roll, smush, smush” them into the bone-like parts, to be fired and glazed and stored in piles, then organized by shape and color.
The new, temporary art installation is “a sphere of tiny porcelain sculptures, each an intimate, bone-like shape, adhered and supported by an elaborate system of aluminum and epoxy.” “The structure celebrates the idea that small things together amount to something impactful; a monument to collective consciousness.”
Thousands of handmade, glazed porcelain parts join together in an eight-foot orb for artist Rebecca Manson’s public installation. Come Closer and the View Gets Wider is a sphere of tiny porcelain sculptures, each an intimate, bone-like shape, adhered and supported by an elaborate system of aluminum and epoxy. Comprised of innumerable parts which on their own may appear insignificant, the structure celebrates the idea that small things together amount to something impactful; a monument to collective consciousness.
Manson started with a four-foot-diameter model of the work, then figured out how to structurally scale it up so that it could be strong enough to be supported. She composed the pieces on a fiberglass dome that served as a mold. Removed from the mold, the two sculptural hemispheres were joined together on a specially fabricated aluminum structure.
“My work uses ceramics as a metaphor for the individual and societal body,” says Manson. “This sculpture was informed by the process of working with clay, a nature that wants to collapse. For me, ceramics is tied to personal resilience and rebuilding in the face of adversity.”
The installation, “Come Closer“ was designed in collaboration with Sigma Design Company, with support from the Windgate Project Grant and NYC Parks. It will be installed by Stebich Ridder International Fine Arts Services, and will be on view in Tribeca Park through July 2019.
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