Luke Boyer

Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist working and living in Brooklyn, New York. The work I am focusing on currently is sculpture. Through sculpture I have been exploring the relationship between steel wire and medical gauze with the aim to freeze a liminal moment in a physical form. I am interested in creating objects that embody transitional states.

The steel wire, which creates the skeleton of the sculptures, is twisted and warped like barbed wire. This physical warping intentionally refrences barbed wire’s connotations with rigidity, control and pain. The inherent language of the wire poses a stark contrast to the other material at play in these forms: medical gauze.

The medical gauze is stretched and wrapped over the wire. The gauze-wrapped wire resembles a medical instrument, alluding to a mending or healing. The gauze’s woven material is what allows the sculpture's volumetric space to be realized. Yet it is the stretching and warping of the weft that grants the form transparency. This transparent threshold articulated by the medical gauze pulled against the sharp points of the wire injects the form with a sense of deterioration. It is on the edge of ruin, yet it still embodies healing. The materiality that allows for its existence also appears as its reason for inevitable decay. By leveraging the contrast inherent to these two materials I hope to pose the analogous relationship between these forms and the transitional states inherent to a corporeal body.

This dynamic between soft and hard, wire and gauze, is what allows the object to feel arrested in a moment. The form is not entirely whole but not in dilapidation either much like a body mending with stitches under bandages. It leaves the viewer wondering if it is rebuilding or in the midst of crumbling. This notion of making an object liminal is present not only in the material relationships but in the form and shape itself.

Throughout the experience of creating these objects, I sought to embody ‘wring,’ meaning to squeeze or twist an object to force liquid from it. The action of wringing signifies a moment of change. Like when a cloth is not full of liquid but not depleted of it either. This is a type of holding and releasing that can be found again in analogous events of the body. With each new form I find myself getting closer to that kinetic moment.

While I have enjoyed the creation of these objects over the past few months, the artistic language I am developing is just in its infancy. There are a variety of ways in which I can explore this relationship of materiality and change, and an entire spectrum of conflict between the gauze and steel wire. Pushing this relationship and notion of a liminal object even further is something that I will continue to do. Despite the many possibilities in the future, I am very confident in the already realized forms and their ability to communicate the dynamics and relationships I have elucidated here.