What the heck is mixed media sculpture?

"Mixed media" artwork is any work that uses more than one material together. In the twentieth century, that means just about everything except origami. For example, the early Picasso & Braque paintings that incorporated collaged elements like newspaper clippings and tickets are mixed media paintings.

"Mixed media sculpture" is three-dimensional artwork that incorporates more than one material. For example... well, you know what, I can't think of really really famous examples of mixed media sculpture that aren't by Picasso. (Is that why I'm not rich?) But if you're familiar with the boxes of Joseph Cornell, the magical site-specific machines of Alice Aycock or installations of General Idea, then you've seen mixed media sculpture.

It's easy to get confused because some folks these days also use the word "media" to encompass the use of audio and video components... but not me. Where I come from, that breed is called "multi-media" art, but YMMV.

For the most part, I make sculpture by sticking stuff together ("additive technique") rather than by carving ("subtractive technique") or casting ("pouring-stuff-into-a-mold technique").

Meanwhile, my work tends to be additive, obsessive, feminist, narrative, human-scaled and disturbing or funny depending on your mindset. The informed viewer may spot the residual effects of a math education, especially in my drawings. I'm preoccupied, of late, with issues and images of location and orientation, order and identity.

Someday, this paragraph will point to short digressions about these themes and images: the fish/salmon thing; the compass/map thing; obsessions with counting and special numbers; stacking and packing.

On a day-to-day basis, what do I do? I draw. A lot. I remodel snowdomes, pack things into boxes, and stack things into precarious heaps. I give in to the itch to acquire odd appealing "stuff" then I try to figure out why I needed to bring it back to the studio. I move it around, heap it up and draw it until I know what I have to do with it.

Someone once said (I heard it first from Tony Urquhart):

"Sculpture is what you trip over when you back up to look at the paintings."