Marcella Hackbardt

Artist Statement

These works are from a series where I investigate the psychological introspection and tension between cherished physical accumulations and intentional rearrangements and sometimes destruction. The groupings and broken parts emphasize the fragile, changeable, and breakable nature of memory and meaning, referring to emotional turbulence and personal struggle, and the intensity of familial love from devotion to grief.

I work with objects formerly collected primarily by women to decorate their homes. The symbolism of the objects references ideals of motherhood, such as ceramic figurines of animal mothers and offspring, babies and angels, and the house as home. The primarily small human and animal figurines and objects are time-worn, sometimes already chipped, and made of delicate materials.

Perhaps these pieces suggest the duties, desires, and dreams of the domestic, and even a willful but often unachievable eviction of recollections that continue to haunt the memory. A previously cherished memory may become a torturous mental burden, a morphology that spans the innocent, intimate, and invasive. Objects connote their own materiality as well as the vulnerable and time-based flesh of the body, and perhaps even the spirit which can break.