August 10th, 2011
Driftwood wave sculpture by Shane Blackbourn
Check out this incredible wave sculpture made out of driftwood (back in 2006), by Californian artist Shane Blackbourn. It measures 40′ wide, 12′ tall, 12′ front-to-back. It’s a modular steel construction with driftwood and wire. Shane spent five months working nearly everyday to complete it! It now resides in a private residence in Palos Verdes, California.
In the same way I use repeated brush strokes in my paintings as a way to re-present representation, I used driftwood as the empty signifier. That is to say that something so culturally loaded as a piece of driftwood is able to lose some or all of it’s cultural significance with a change in context. The driftwood sort of becomes brush strokes in a giant three-dimensional painting that is about other people’s paintings.
See more on the artist’s blog here…
