WINNER - Rookwood Sculptures Award
The Read Shoes Vanitas (2021)
Glazed ceramic and concrete base
The Red Shoes is a large totemic sculpture fusing symbols from the mythic world and elements of fashion with fantasies of a recalibrated western art canon. It depicts fetishes stereotypically associated with female desirability: posing, fashion and breasts. These symbols of vanity are positioned as amusements that act as a veil of obscurity, but which also humour and celebrate the fecundity of life and the futility of pleasure. In building up these stacked and loaded parts, I am building up a new belief system from remnants of old ones, discarding the broken and bad parts and elevating those which were previously underestimated or hidden. This piece inverts the hierarchy of the cerebral over the corporeal by reprioritising the essential, the nourishing and the pleasurable.
About the Artist
Cybele Cox lives on Garigal Country, in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. She explores ancient feminine symbols and mysticism, using hand built ceramic totems and figures, painting, drawing and costume. Cybele completed her MFA at Sydney College of the Arts with an exchange to The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where she exhibited in Rundgang and Aa Collections. Cybele has also exhibited at Lismore Regional Gallery, First Draft, Coma Gallery, Strange Neighbour Melbourne, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, The Ideas Platform, The MCA Art Bar and Kudos Gallery. Cybele won the 2017 Stonevilla Wearable Art Prize and was awarded a one year studio residency at Artspace in 2018.
Transcription
Hello. My name is Cybele Cox and my work is called the Red Shoes for the Rookwood HIDDEN Sculpture walk. The Red Shoes is a large totemic sculpture, fusing symbols from the mythic world and elements of fashion with fantasies of a recalibrated western art cannon.
It depicts fetishes stereotypically associated with female desirability, that of posing, fashion and breasts. These symbols of vanity are positioned as amusements that act as a vail of obscurity, but which also humour and celebrate the fecundity of life and the futility of pleasure. In building up these stacked and loaded parts, I am building up new, a new belief system from remnants of old ones, discarding the broken and bad parts and elevating those which were previously underestimated or hidden. This piece inverts the hierarchy of the cerebral over the corporeal by re-prioritizing the essential, the nourishing and the pleasurable. Red Shoes is a vertical arrangement that speaks across millennia of visual history and culture, from prehistoric totems to classical columns. From modernist forms to contemporary statuary. Roundels of pendulous breasts, eyes, limbs, feet and other vital fleshy things are stacked between symbols of Memento Mori qrt, historical motives and the geometries of the vast pottery cannon.
There is humor in upending, in placing the corpulent and unwieldy atop of pedestal and Red Shoes is a fine balancing act between gravity and liberty. The reason I think this work is suitable for the Rookwood Cemetery is that it's a statute. It's placed on a classical column and that is what you see. That is so remarkable about some of those old gravestones. They are so, stately well carved, well crafted objects that have partial architecture and, you know, script but also, yeah, it's a momento that wants to last for a long time. It wants to always be a dignified memorial of the person who's no longer with us, and my work really is a celebration of life and the fashion elements of red shoes and baggy pants and frills combined with the column like architectural elements of the waistline and finally, the figures who are suckling on the mother's breast.
All of these things are a celebration of life, which in a way is connected to death when you place them together, such as the Rookwood Cemetery. So I want people to enjoy the work. I want them to have fun and look at it and find anything fascinating to talk, to touch it, to just enjoy a statue with a kind of a contemporary and sort of humorous edge to it.