Wire and hair sculpture

These images, as the title of the post suggests, are all of sculptural works made from wire and human hair. In the late 90s and early 00s I worked a lot with wire, generally making cage-like sculptures which I stuffed with various materials, or covered in others. I made 20 or so grid works which had rectangular wire boxes (see more at this post). A number of them had hair stuffed into them. The first is called, if I remember rightly, Blessed are the Brunettes for they Shall Inherit the Earth. Each box is about 5x8cm?


I'm looking through the room sheet for the Touch show and having a bit of trouble remembering the title of this work. Possibly Tell Me I'm Beautiful? These individual boxes are about 10x15cm?

This is one of two works which I've called The Stepford Wives. It's about conformity. (The other work with this title was a hair weaving.) The same size as the first work above.

This is called Hate and Envy and Crime and Darkness and Pain, which later became the title of a solo show at Kudos in 2007. I covered boxes in papier-mâché, burnt them, then stuffed them with hair and covered the lot with polyester resin.


These are some hair dolls which I've shown before (see the link at the top of this post). These were the first ones that I made and I tried to make them like like they were walking.











Here are some shaped sculptures which were quite popular. I made two teddy bears, but I think the first was much more successful than the blonde one (even though it was made first). This one is A Sydney Bear, and the second is Picnic For One.



This piece was punningly called Cheveux en Marche. It really should have had two horses so the cheveux/chevaux pun would be more relevant, but there was only one.

This is Love is Like an Itching in my Heart:


This one might be Heaven Comes to He Who Waits, but I'd have to go digging around the attic to find photos of the show to check. It ended up outdoors in a garden to see what would happen. The wire rusted and the hair became bleached and insect-ridden.



These three were less successful, I think. I was experimenting with more shapes. The first is not anything in particular.


This is a rudimentary spider, called Such Stuff as Nightmares are Made On.


This is, hmmm, an ant, I guess. No idea of the title. There are so many angry titles (The End Justifies the Means, And You Let the Wicked Prosper, Memories Fade but the Scars Still Linger, Everyone Hates Everyone, The World Spins and Spits Turmoil, Pity) that it's hard to tell them apart!

Sketchbook Project

This post features a sketchbook that I filled in for the Sketchbook Project 3 for the Art House Gallery in Atlanta. The theme was "everyone we know" but I just filled it with collage and text and drawings. The project exhibits around 2000 sketchbooks in 7 cities over a couple of months. It opens at the Art House Gallery in Atlanta tomorrow, February 27. It then will go to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Brooklyn. I've called my sketchbook Rodney Love: Room For Improvement.

Publications

I wanted to show some things that had been published last year. The first is an interview with Dominique Angeloro in Incubate magazine which I wrote about last year (see this post). There is a pdf of the issue of the magazine (Issue 2, Summer 2008) which is easier to read here.

This is a catalogue from the Entanglement exhibition which I was in last year. My work is the series of sock panels at the bottom of page 2. (Click on the photos for a larger readable version)

This is the page with my details from the catalogue of Momentum, the 18th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial.