- Karen LaMonte

For me, being an artist is about being curious, about constantly examining and responding to the world around me. Given the world we live in, it is no surprise that my newest explorations involve as much science and technology as they do art history. What follows are snapshots of explorations mid-step, down paths with unknown destinations.

Over the past several years, I have returned to the human figure and the landscape, but I am now working with scientists and inventors in my search for methods and materials to make sculpture.

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Just as the Floating World series looked at my earlier themes of body and beauty, and presence and absence, but through a different cultural lens, my new work with figurines is a reexamination of the body through the lens of new technologies and materials that mimic human biology. I am also revisiting clouds and climate, which I had investigated in my early works and the Drapery Abstractions series, but this time I am doing

so in collaboration with climatologists, material scientists, and roboticists.

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Although I have been working on these projects for several years, I feel I am still at the beginning. 

What follows are snapshots of explorations mid- step, down paths with unknown destinations.

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BEAUTY AND BIOLOGY: THE FIGURINES

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Around 2014, I became interested in going  beyond the veneer of culture and looking under clothing at the figure on a more primordial level. The body is our common denominator—it transcends culture, gender, and time. I started thinking about the figure in its purely physical manifestation and asking questions about biology

and being in the twenty-first century.

My studio in Prague, Czech Republic, is three hundred miles away from the cave in Germany where the oldest-known depiction of a human being was discovered: the Venus of Hohle Fels. Standing just two and a half inches tall, this diminutive carving in mammoth ivory is forty thousand years old. She fascinates me.

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We do not know why the carving was made or how it was used. Some anthropologists believe it is about fertility, sex, and reproduction—the power of the female essence. Maybe, like the Roman goddess of love and beauty we named her after, she represents the divine.

I am drawn to her because she embodies the enduring impulse to create art in our own image. I am also intrigued by questions she raises about gender and perception: Why are the majority of figurines made over the next ten thousand years female? And, since three-quarters of the handprints in prehistoric cave drawings were

female, were the first artists mostly women?

As I embarked on making modern figurines, I wanted to acknowledge the history but reflect the times in which they are made. When the Venus of Hohle Fels was carved, daily life was perilous; we would probably have categorized ourselves as an endangered species. Yet the times that we live in now are perhaps just as perilous. As a species, we are abundant, but our activities are destroying the environment that we need to sustain ourselves. The threat of our extinction is once again a possibility.

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We live in an age of synthetic biology—a time, more than any era before, when we can alter our bodies. As a figurative sculptor, I had been working metamorphically with materials to talk about being human. But once I began exploring the figurines, I felt it important to work with materials that mimic human biology.

I learned about biomimetic materials by studying the field of regenerative medicine. This first led me to Dr. Joseph Vacanti, a preeminent researcher in the field, whom I visited in his lab at Harvard University. I was looking for a sculpting material that was whitish and semitranslucent. He showed me astonishing decellularized organs and three-dimensional printed collagen, but nothing I felt I could use. I turned my attention to making Nocturnes, but the idea of working with biomimetic materials never left my mind.

Several years later, when I was the artist in residence at Corning Incorporated’s research facility in Sullivan Park, I learned about biomedical glasses. There are many types ranging from bioactive glasses, which dissolve in contact with body fluids providing raw materials that the body uses to heal, to tough stable glass-ceramics used as permanent replacements for tooth and bone.

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I wanted to utilize biomimetic materials to explore the tension between our desire for eternal physical perfection and the reality of our faults, aging, and death. Bioactive glasses seemed perfect because they are designed to be unstable and impermanent. When implanted in the body, they transform and become part of the person.

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I came to think of the glass ceramic used for bone and tooth replacement as biomimetic ivory. It offered a link back to the mammoth tusk of the Venus of Hohle Fels. Using it to make my figurines gave me a vocabulary to explore the timeless commonality that binds us together.

The motif of small-scale figurines—the Venuses, netsuke, porcelain from the nineteenth century, even action figures—springs from the instinct to re-create ourselves. To make a figurine for the twenty-first century, I wanted to use the same tools that we are beginning to use in regenerative medicine to repair and modify our bodies. The work started in my studio where I composed still lifes with fabric, furniture, and live models. Then, I used a device that 3-D scans body parts for the manufacture of custom prosthetics to capture the compositions and reduce the scale.

My investigation into the Venus of Hohle Fels began me thinking about how we define ourselves by the materials we use. We define the epochs of prehistory by material: the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. I had been focused on biomimetic materials, but I started to expand my experiments, seeing other materials as an interesting way to connect our present to our  ancient past, and linking my figurines to the earliest endeavors of modern humans.

I had already been experimenting with glass—what the  ancient Egyptians called “the stone that flows.” I began using bronze, which embodies timelessness and human intervention, and pewter, which dates to the Bronze Age but evokes Victorian toy soldiers. And, finally, I utilized rusting iron, which I had used in Floating World and Nocturnes to speak to transience and transformation. It is a perfect vehicle to communicate time and change.

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In thinking about the idea of Venus in the twenty-first century, I am also compelled to look at the broadest manifestation of the feminine, including not only cisgender females of every body type, race, and religion but also transgender and non-binary people. To me, exploring this expansive expression of inherent beauty is one of the most exciting aspects of reinventing an ancient icon.

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