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Sculptures for Mice
2022
1 ton seed bag, polypropylene fertilizer bags, Mexican sycamore bark, sunflower seed head and seeds, found plastic twine, terracotta, computer electronic wires, industrial floor waxing pad, brown paper, cotton-polyester thread
Silo interior and exterior installation: 35 x 35 x 14 ft.
GP: If one can make sculpture for humans, why not sculpture for mice? Someone left a sunflower head full of seeds on the floor of this silo; every night, mice would enter through the hole in the wall, and drop the sunflower shells in a circular pattern as they nibbled the seeds from atop the sunflower head. I also noticed that if I moved some assorted objects around on the silo floor during the day, the next morning, there would be little trails in the dust showing where the mice had come out in the night to check on what I had been doing. Sometimes the mice would also move things around, and I realized that the mice and I were mimicking each other by gathering and arranging things, albeit with different goals in mind. I was already busy helping plant regenerative crop species outside of the silo as a sort of human-animal social practice experiment, so I decided that working both inside and outside of the silo gave me the opportunity to create conditions that would let me better inhabit the mice’s point of view.
I took an empty, one-ton seed bag and hand stitched on dozens of sycamore bark bits and remnants from other seed bags onto it before hanging it from the apex of the silo. This central piece became an anchor from which I could weave a net that connected it to the silo walls while also gradually slanting downward. This forced human viewers to lower their bodies and walk in a clockwise fashion until they were at the floor, on the mice’s level. Beneath the central piece, I placed small sculptures I had made specifically for holding sunflower seeds, along with some assorted, recycled materials I thought the mice might like to use as nesting material. The opening at the uppermost part of the silo (normally used for filling the structure with something like grain or silage) allowed sunlight to enter the space. Placing the totem beneath this opening created a visual receptacle within a larger receptacle for both receiving and exchanging energy within the space, speaking to the mice’s and my co-creation of the artwork.