BOUND

NATALIE LEBLANC

One of my favourite sculpture/installation artists is Magdalena Abakanowicz. The first time that I saw one of her works, I was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York city and I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. Why is it that when a sculpture is so well-crafted it looks not crafted at all? A series of pod-like sculptures made from natural materials— reeds, twigs, and branches — lay neatly in a row. They held an eery presence like things you would see tagged and categorized in a natural history, anthropology, or biology museum. Yet here they were in a museum of modern art.

My sculptures not only portray the human body as being part of the natural world, they present an analogy for the body-nature relationship in which the body is both made from, and bound by, nature. This series was made from my body, a process in which I began by making wire casts of my body and then followed by wrapping them with raffia, and adorning them with reeds collected from the edge of the river near my childhood home, where I used to sit and watch the sunset each night.