Rebecca Warren: The Now Voyager

Rebecca Warren (b. 1965) makes sculptures in a variety of materials including clay, bronze, steel and neon. The artist also creates collages and wall mounted vitrines using assemblages of objects she has collected. Warren says about her work that ‘it comes from a strange nowhere, then gradually something comes out into the light. There are impulses, half-seen shapes, things that might have stuck with you from decades ago, as well as more recently. It’s all stuff in the world going through you as a filter …’

‘To say that Rebecca Warren’s sculptures are always extremely tactile seems like an understatement. They offer themselves as hybrids between unwrought form, symbolic informe, and transmitter, an object triggering an entire chain of associations with lofty and lowly forerunners or reproductions, whether drawn from antiquity or from the artistic and non-artistic canons. Seething before our eyes is cultural primal matter, in which the hand of the artist at times seems to play simply the role of catalyst, while the elements fuse themselves together.’

B. Curiger, ‘In all things a song lies sleeping’, in Rebecca Warren – Every Aspect of Bitch Magic, London: Fuel Publishing, 2012, p. 13