SKILLZ SHARE: PAPIER-MÂCHÉ
SKILLZ SHARE: PAPIER-MÂCHÉ
Zoe Statiris is a third year student at Ryerson University. She likes to paint, draw, and take long walks on the beach. In her video Zoe makes a papier-mâché butterfly sculpture!
Using plaster casts and various found objects to recreate his parents’ Kosher butcher shop in Bronx, New York, George Segal places us right in front of a replica of its storefront window. Inside we see a woman in profile hard at work in front of a butcher block, wielding a large cleaver. Interestingly, this plaster figure is an actual cast of the artist’s mother. To her right, two long horizontal chromium slats with spear tips act as mounts for a series of hooks that hold a bone saw and a chicken she will surely butcher. Directly under these hooks is another pile of bird corpses.
Active in New York in the 1960s, when Pop art was at the height of its popularity, George Segal made his mark by creating life-sized figurative sculptures that depict ordinary people in everyday situations. To sculpt the human form, he would wrap live models in plaster-dipped orthopedic bandages meant for medical casts, removing them after they had hardened and re-assembling them to make a hollow plaster shell of the model’s full body. In The Butcher Shop, Segal uses his own life as inspiration for the scene.
