My work is witness to life now: to the Anthropocene, the Sixth Great Extinction. It is about loss, persistence, and the numinosity of both. To witness, is to change the field in which something is occurring. To witness death, to witness beauty, is to become changed by it. To be changed is to create change.
I am interested in creating a field of potent and complex stillness where room for contemplating the unthinkable exists. My work speaks to the danger, fragility, and endurance of life and death. Because transformation occurs where beauty and struggle coexist, where resistance and surrender meet, vulnerability is essential in the work.
I approach this content with materials and processes that have the capacity to carry difficult ideas – ones that are both substance and symbol. For example, sheet lead, equally poisonous as protective (from radiation), suggests the biological when bulged and pierced with hair. The Luminous Room – simultaneously permeable and impenetrable, consisting of horse hairs selected and combined by hand into thousands of individually suspended 10′ long strands – invokes through craft and repetition an order that is devotional, infinite, and lies at the edges of the viewer’s imagination.
Email the Artist: sculptor@millicentyoung.com
