bone series installation

Jenni Ward ceramic sculpture | bone series | museum of art and history

The Bone Series was installed as an “anchored” component to the Everybody’s Ocean exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History curated by Justin Hoover in 2015. The exhibition is part crowd-sourced, part curated presenting personal relationships with the sea. This piece is an abstract interpretation of the remains of an aquatic biological creature that has been reassembled, just as a whale skeleton might be configured for an educational display.  I imagine that these pieces might be discovered in the natural world as the only clues to the past of what this creature might have been. This composition is comprised of multiple individual discs of clay with holes cut and carved into them. The discs range in size from approximately 1″ to 12″ across. The disc fragments are arranged in a linear format that is approximately 7′ long and suspended by steel cables hanging over 7′ in the air.

photo credit: Nina Hipkins