Paige Wells

Tinseltown

My sculpture practice focuses on assemblage through found objects and other collected items, coming from reuse stores, dollar stores, and my own detritus. The found objects I use inform my decision-making for how an idea will be manifested in my work. Ideas I'm most interested in are recreating time from memory, dreams, and my adolescence. My work is inspired by family and its traditions, storytelling, western pop culture, and places of home. I use childhood ephemera familiar to the 2000s like, clay, gems, yarn, food, and bright paints in my work to achieve those feelings of nostalgia and attraction. All the found ubiquitous items, made in cheap production, coupled with personal possessions and my images engage with humor through their decontextualization and honesty. My process is additive and develops with new materials and compounding ideas over time. I started my art practice in abstract and cartoon-like painting, inspired by surrealist artists, and I now use the same process of thinking in arrangement, spatial connections, line, and color. I can build relationships and stories between objects when working through physical attachments and utilizing those techniques of abstraction. Techniques like scale shifts, amorphous shapes, 2-D forms becoming 3-D, highly colorful transformations, and raw material within the found makes the work come together. When objects and materials can be extended out of their purpose, place, and intended function they enter a new eccentric space. In my work, I want to open new worlds where possessions of mine and found objects can start over and have new lives. It challenges the idea of needing truth to describe reality, being that something made up can be equally important in portraying a life.

@paieyege

paigejwells3@gmail.com