Cloud Beauty

Clouds made of styrofoam cups, by Tara Donovan    (from Ace Gallery)

Tara Donovan is an Brooklyn-based artist exploring sculpture by assembling everyday objects including plastic objects such as translucent straws and Styrofoam cups into fields. The layers of the objects give seductive shading gradient effects throughout the fields. Her untitled pieces made with Styrofoam cups made me pay attention to the porosity of plastic. Her method of creativity begins with choosing materials rather than expecting the end result.  By seeing textures, lights and forms of her piece, it is convincing that material selection is an essential and fundamental step of her work.

Amongst many of materials she dealt with, Styrofoam cups were interesting not only by their effects from lights but also the influence of their deformation to the form of the field. Some of deformations might be beyond her controls but the “randomness” of deformations seems to go along with her intention to mimic how nature grows. It’s unfortunate that I have not been able to test the stiffness of the field, not to test if it’s “structural”, but to see if these deformations are defined results from field’s packing system.