art.308:sculpture studio

hannah piper burns

project 3- installation and site

"gnash"

i created an installation in the white room, a student theatre space located in the bowels of the arts and letters building on campus. my goal was to create an environment that was also an internal tableau, dealing with the subject of teeth and anxiety. in order to accomplish this i knew that i would need to engage the audience on a multisensory level, and so my piece consists of four major parts: a table with a stonehenge-like arrangement of deer teeth, a ground of gravel and potato chips that a viewer must walk on to reach the table, a set of three extremely dim lights, two red and one white, shone onto the table and the only source of light in the space, and a stereo in a dark far corner of the room which was set to loop a sound piece created by recording various "mouth noises"- that is, chomping, chewing, gnashing, grinding.

the inspiration for this piece came from seeing louise bourgeois' tableau installations, and from my own very personal experience and dream imagery. i wanted to create a solemn yet highly anxiety-inducing environment by surrounding the viewer with specific sounds, images, and tactile experiences. the teeth are arranged in a way to make them look like a ceremonial offering or obsessive patterning, and the way the light hits them makes the faintest glow of red shine in their crevices. the sound moves abruptly between tyoes if noises as i cut and pasted pieces of the tracks somewhat randomly together.

i would have liked this piece to have been bigger, with more teeth arranged in concentric circles covering the entire surface of the table, and enough gravel and potato chips (which combined create a strange tactile tension between solidity and brittle fragility) to completely cover the floor. the white room (ironically named) was a perfect location for this piece because it is entirely painted black, leaving the viewer in a large dark space with very little in it, and no clues as to what fills the rest of the space. i would have also have liked to have more of a choice in type of table, as i feel that with a vanity i could tie the piece back more towards my own specific dream imagery, which was what inspired the piece in the first place. also, i would like to see what a sink, with circles of teeth glued in circles all over the inside of the basin, would do to change the piece. indeed, i feel that the weakest part of the work is its ambiguity between internal and external space- i would like to draw the viewer into a more internal environment.