Peter Barbor

Artist Statement

I draw from the deep well of history. Kouros figures, depictions of Christ,and unruly Anglo Saxon warriors all animate my imagination as I try to parse the old idea of the young man. Whether he stands as a hero or walks in violence, by mining ancient imagery I fashion myself into an intersection of past and present. How the image existed before the era of art, and how it functions now, forms the arch of time I consider in the studio.

My material lexicon is born of dust. Using clay, cement, plaster, and paper, I stretch skins and pinch into place bodies and form. Intuition serves as my principal guide. I seek to make sculpture a process analogous to drawing. Often, crude armatures serve as the skeletal support for a flesh that is a haphazard mixture of plastic materials.

As I satisfy my gestural impulse, I barter with gravity, weight, and the unwieldy alchemies at my fingertips. I hold at the back of my mind historical references as prototypes, which intersect with the raw sensibility of my making. Approaching resolution, my sculptures may be suspended in a moment of becoming or decomposition.

Borrowing from images whose original contexts have long expired, I acknowledge time’s flattening effect on history.What remains extant; what has distorted in the present tense? Asking this question, I hope to argue that all that is old is new again. To pick at the body of my forefather, I examine my own.

Artist Website

Peter Barbor
Master of Fine Arts
3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture

[blockquote author=”Professor of 3D4M: Ceramics + Glass + Sculpture, Doug Jeck” pull=”normal”]“Be assured, despite the austere, majestic stature of his finished works, that Peter Barbor’s phrenetic energy in the studio has been a splashy theatrical combustion of mash-up material calisthenics, man/boy psyche squeezing, Heroic man handling, and dashing, sentient scholarship!”[/blockquote]

Committee:
Doug Jeck (chair), Amie McNeel, Jamie Walker, Ivan Drpic