individual sculpture work

click any image to enlarge & scroll

prayer brick

early London sculpture

These pieces were made during my first years living in London. I’ve included them on my site in part because I love them and in part to advocate for my herstory of using their materials and elements.

The small untitled multimedia sculpture created in 1993 was my first use of bicycle inner tube rubber, a material I’ve continued to embrace in my sculpture and painting work. I was already an avid cyclist by this time and was making long distance cycling trips in the UK to visit sacred pre-Christian sites that align with First Nations culture. I also incorporated my love of cycling and its entwinement with good relationship with the earth in the 1992 live artwork The Earth & Myself.

The triplet of soft architectural sculptures made a year earlier (1992) were a site specific installation created for a meadow along the Parkland walk, a tract of land near to our London flat that had previously been a railway track. They were one of my earliest pieces using lashed together stick frames reminiscent of Indigenous Plains Nations burial platforms, which I’ve continued to use in the nest series from that period until now.

This piece was created in the period immediately after I’d been intensely focussed on the scar series, and uses the same double pointed sticks I’d begun making intuitively and later learned from an Anishnawbe elder were used in the ‘old days’ as ceremonial prayer offerings. I feel comfortable using them in my artworks, as they came to me as part of my creative vision. In contemporary art terms, I understand them to be a signature element of my creative practice. I’ve had a number of iconic and unique things ‘borrowed’ from my practice, but if you’re one of the artists who’s been involved in this and back looking for more, I really recommend you leave these alone. That is if you understand anything about medicine..

The bandaging of seemingly incongrous elements is something I continued with Regeneration Nation and am using again now in additonal prayer bricks. Please see the note below if you’re interested in seeing them and other new work.

In the interest of protecting work in vulnerable stages of development, I now keep my newest pieces on a private page until they, and/or other closely related works, have been seen in public venues and/or by my peers in a public context, so that there is a public record of the production & timeline of signature elements and artworks in my practice.

To see new sculpture, interested curators, collectors or other arts professionals may contact me to request access to this webpage at Winter at Winter-Brown dot com.

Hiy hiy,
Bebonkwe ᐱᐳᐣ