Charles Mulford

Artist Statement

Charles Mulford's sculpture practice emerged from a period of pneumonia and respiratory failure. The sculptures join 3D-scanned human heads with bodies assembled from organs, medical equipment, and comfort foods, embodying the condition of a person who has become inseparable from their treatment.

Illness is mostly hidden and endured privately, but these sculptures bring the broken body into public view with dark humor. Humor and horror inhabit the same sculpture: a head sinking into a mass of intestines resting on an Oreo cookie, a pair of lungs acting as ears. The work holds this tension without resolution. When your only comfort is an Oreo cookie, absurdity and fear become almost the same thing.

The bone white filament used throughout the series belongs to a hospital environment, recalling the off-white and beige plastics of medical equipment like IV stands and monitoring devices. In certain lighting and across smooth surfaces, the filament reads as plaster or marble. Where layer lines are visible, the material declares itself as industrial technology. The work is portrait bust scale, sized for the same close proximity as an illness experienced in a hospital bed. The failing bodies trap the scanned heads inside an illness they cannot escape. The figures endure their conditions, and in that endurance, survival becomes its own form of resistance.