Sydney Little
The human body gives its names to nature. Cypress trees have knees: small growths that protrude from the earth, desperate to reach the surface, proximal to full-grown trees. They are hardly understood. They grow in groups. One botanist calls them “underachieving stalagmites.” They are all potential, never quite realized. I park my 2002 Minivan near these shapes that force the grass to give way.
When the Beanie Baby craze faded, those that did not find themselves collected (with original tags) and stored away as anthropological documents of how children play, made their way into proverbial dustbins and if lucky, Houston Goodwill, which is where I found my two subjects. Like all old toys, they call out. They are soft, malleable, comforting, and if not fragile, certainly transitory.
Cement gives permanence. Intractability. The process of pouring cement to make sculptures involves multiple steps, some physical strength, and the will to make things, whether their origins are natural or factory-made, endure. Cement has neutralized their colorations into grayness, though their own hues have been diminished by weather and time. Their textures resonate in the hard medium. In “The Oven Bird,” Robert Frost asked, “... what to make of a diminished thing.”
The knees exist in a public space. My cement renditions of the knees reify and transmit them to a private, artistic space, and celebrate the strange obduracy of the arboreal world. The teddies exist in a personal space. My cement renditions have been transported and implanted in vacant or decaying spaces throughout the city of Houston. Photographing them provides another iteration of their will to exist. Who will find them? The relational nature of art that exists in public and private spheres, whether found or made, is meaningful to me.
