Sculpture and Installation
Soft Touch, 2006
Cast iron, cast porcelain, painted wood
Installation dimensions variable; blocks @ 12″x12″x12″
Twelve iron casts of a small girl’s hand rest on foot square painted wood blocks. Each hand touches a plain female peg doll, slip cast in porcelain and jointed with white embroidery thread. The installation reflects on moments of reversal when a daughter’s strength surpasses that of her mother.
Soft Touch premiered at Soho20 Chelsea as part of “Soft Touch/Wondering Eye”, a collaborative exhibition with my father, R. Darrel Bock, who offered a selection from his life’s work in art photography on the surrounding walls.
The exhibition catalog, available for download below, includes a preface by the artists with essays by Zofia Burr introducing the collections of work. In addition to work in the exhibition, the catalog surveys my previous work, including collaborative performance installations with poetry by Zofia Burr and choreography by Julia Mayer.
Soft Touch/Wondering Eye SaveSave
I recast my original 1998 Afterbirth (Sac Fluid Cord) in fresh translucent glycerin for the traveling exhibition “Take Care: Biomedical Ethics in the 21st Century” in its seventh and last showing at The Wright Museum at Beloit College in 2012. Three dustpans hold a glass bottle in each of their handles. One carries a bit of amniotic sac, the next some amniotic fluid, and the last a section of umbilical cord. It is a piece about birth and after, about the usually discarded experience of labor, about the care taking that follows, about nourishment, preservation, and decay.