#The ritual creature maquette series#

Do I want my head to be here on this piece, or here, do I want to be able to walk through it? Do I want to be able to climb up on it. I can get an idea in the clay through my hands, quickly, rapidly, do a lot of body work, then I make a tiny little figure and I imagine myself down here. 'I originally started working in clay, that's how I got into graduate school. 'So this little piece, I call these my maquettes,' she explains. I point to a small ceramic figure on a tabletop in the garage, that's reminiscent of one of Rodin's ecstatic nudes. Pennington often starts small, using clay to work out her ideas in an immediate way. Its buffalo-ness isn't explicit, rather, suggested by its scale and its haunches, and the way the wool hangs. It's a massive white creature too big to see around, made of plaster, foam, ceramic, and wool. A spiritual, sculptural, political protector, in a stance against that violence.' And so I was getting really angry and sad, and in Indiana feeling very separated from the violence being done to other women's children. And this piece was created back in the fall of 2014 when ISIS was ramping up and cutting off children's heads. You can see the spine and the hindquarters. 'This is my mama beast piece,' Pennington reveals. This is my mama beast piece, created in the fall of 2014, when ISIS was ramping up and cutting off children's heads. Pennington's 'beasts' are splayed across her front lawn and skulking under tarps in her garage studio. Securing the perimeter of her own home place are Pennington's own hulking forms, equally redolent of anatomy and primal energy, possibly demanding their own blood meal. Â If you don't keep it alive, disaster could occur in your village.' Where The Wild Things Are But still this humped, powerful buffalo form. 'It's a form of the buffalo, often, and the more it's coated with all these secret ingredients, the more abstracted the form becomes. The boli starts out, Pennington explains, as a representational form. And they speak over it and they spit over it, and they do all kinds of things that we don't know about.' And it's a fetish object, a ritual object that is kept alive through sacrifice, blood sacrifice. 'Part of the protection of the village is to feed this sacred objectit's called a boli. Making a healing or protective object inspired by the human, or animal form is a concept the sculptor came across in West African culture. 'These things are healers,' Pennington asserts, 'but they don't get talked about as a healing thing because there's so much damage that happens as well, in that arena.' I often have these beasts in these impossible situations that they could release themselves frombecause they're these big giant powerful animalsbut they keep getting stuck in these potentially deadly situations.Â These totems are not for titillation, Pennington insists, but for comfort and renewal. Â 'They start showing me their drawings of pornography and I'm like, âNo, that's not what this is about, at all. 'It's really interesting the way men respond to those pieces,' Pennington notes.

There's a certain predictability to the way people interpret the work. 'And that gets real saucy real fast!' she laughs.

That's the one that won the prize at the Kinsey show Â 'My next iteration of the phallus in wood was a rideable phallus'

#The ritual creature maquette series#

'I did a series of phallus piecesone was called the ' Huggable Tuggable' it was a big furry phallus,' Pennington explains. It's not that surprising when she explains what she was making at the time. I think I've always known I'm a strong mammal.Īt the 2015 Kinsey Institute Juried Art Show, however, Pennington's sculpture won the Visitor's Choice Award. Â The Visiting ProfessorÂ at Indiana University's School of Art and Design started sculpting 20 years ago at Wheaton College, a private Christian school that didn't allow nude models in the art classes. Melanie Cooper Pennington makes big biomorphic sculptures, out of wood, metal, and ceramic, sometimes wrapped in fur or hung with wool.