Rebecca Warren (b. 1965)

Bunny, a pubescent youth, posture erect and poised, is an object to be fetishized and immediately calls to mind Degas' Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, although Warren manages to both invoke and skew the famous sculpture by Degas, forming a complex visual language of her own. Manipulating the clay with physicality--clumping, lumping, and twisting--she deletes all signs of perfection; instead she emphasizes the visual signs of squeezed flesh. Her strong sense of formal awareness brings sensitivity to the weight and the proportions to each area of the female nude, inflating and emphasizing individual sections of the body to fetishize thick caves, voluptuous hips, and bulging breasts. At first glance the sculptural surface displays aggression but there is a hand-made quality that reads both unfinished and tender. Warren blurs the boundaries between loveable and unlovable, sensual and grotesque, redefining what sculpture should and should not be.

"The beauty of working with a material like clay is that it gives you that freedom to change thingsI like to keep the quality that they're breeding quite quickly and they're made quite quickly, that there's a sense of them perhaps not being complete, to keep them alive and dynamic and fresh" (R. Warren).