New Sculptural Work in Ink

My art allows me to be the initiator of my own history. I choose subjects and materials equally that reflects my Asian-American female-hood  and navigates through a life experience in perpetual identity crisis and awakening. My new sculptural work using organic material (protein-based ink from my childhood and Chinese heritage) is a spiritual and healing practice led by process and experimentation. It is a material I know more and more intimately and represents me.

 

I apply conventional methods and inventive techniques so the sculptures I make in ink can be formed and dehydrated, and still be rehydrated and deformed. Animal protein and pigments are mixed over heat so that I can manipulate them into form. This organic material is fundamentally transformative and impermanent, impacted by heat and moisture. Ink sculptures are of mortal minutiae itself composed. It is not just applied to the surface. It is the surface.

 

I also use ink as a surrogate for time and time travel.  The ink I make is derived from ancient and traditional Chinese ink sticks which was focal to rituals that made up my childhood painting lessons. Though personal, ink is ubiquitous and grapples with the multitude of personal and collective transformations happening in a fast-growing age of anxiety.

"It's not just ink on a

surface. It IS the surface."

- Jong

In 2014, I visited Guilin China and encountered a 'water prison' in a preserved limestone river cave dwelling - a trench as deep as 8ft eroded over time by the river tides that had held prisoners left to die by drowning - and reinterpreted it as my body as a water prison in a site specific performance in an underground bunker in Shanghai China. Revisiting the Chinese ink stick by using it to mark the walls recalled memories from childhood. The lines not only renegotiate with body, form and place, mortality and transcendence, it also draws a line from which I began to reclaim the ancient ink as my own.  

FOR MORE NEW SCULPTURAL WORK IN INK   >  Studio visit 

Video with audio please

FLUNG INK - customized air pressure ink cannons, performace, my parts as targets

Process - Injecting, shooting, becoming ink 

Etiquetta - She's A Bitch 2016 Upstate NY

Etiquetta - She's A Bitch 2016

Upstate NY

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Target practice, Upstate NY

Target practice, Upstate NY

Etiquetta - She's A Bitch 2016 Upstate NY

Etiquetta - She's A Bitch 2016

Upstate NY

Target 1

Target 1

Target 2 

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Target 3

Target practice, Upstate NY

Target practice, Upstate NY

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    Etiquetta - She's A Bitch 2016

    Upstate NY

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    Target practice, Upstate NY

Ellen Jong © 2020