Molly Welch

A Huge Collapse

December 2015

I have spent the better part of the last year making sculptures that I hope might fall over. If it falls over, is it ruined? Is it no longer a sculpture but an ambiguous pile of materials on the floor? A fallen sculpture has a distinctly different fate than a drawing or painting on the floor, and all of these occurrences are completely hilarious to me.

These sculptures are composed of over-sized 8 to 12 foot slabs of rough-cut lumber that lean, bend, or teeter toward collapse. Each title in the series “Wedge, Screw, Dowel and Tape” describe the method by which the sculpture is erected or otherwise supported. Balance and inertia are essentially the subject matter, and they inform the shape and composition of each piece. I’m drawn to the potential for disaster- the terrible reality of something unexpectedly falling apart, and situate myself to wait, and hopefully see time and gravity exact their revenge on these tenuous structures.

My new series of works on paper “unedition I-VIII” are a continuation of a body of work exploring the often complicated and necessary relationship between day-job and studio practice, and the semantics of 'work'. The provenance of the materials I use is integral to the work I make, and in this series the rejected prints from edition printing for another artist are used as material. By destroying each image with industrial shredder, or random and organized geometric cuts, and then re-assembling the prints, they are assigned a new author, and a new subject.

View Molly Welch on Dose Projects