23. Corey Black

Protogi, 2023

sand-cast and shot-blasted aluminium with rubberised, bronzed plate and chromed finishes; and cast pigmented epoxy resin, pelletised HDPE

Transcription

My name is Corey Black, I’m an artist working with sculpture on Gadigal land. My work Protogi, is a sculpture in 4 parts that speculates on bodily decay and the instruments and technologies that begin those processes, it looks at how bodies are broken down because of time and the apparatuses they are contained within. Alongside that it ruminates on historical methods of entombment and burial to explore what future methods might look like. I think of the work as one piece that’s been dispersed. It’s made up of many parts like my own body and other bodies with each part and object serving a purpose to the overall form and structure. I was particularly interested in scale for these works and how scale plays a role in terms of decay time, scales between bodies such as mine and the body of the Earth and evolutionary scale as well as how we observe these processes.

The bulk of the works have been made from objects I’ve sculpted on my laptop, which I’ve then 3D printed and had sand cast in a metal foundry. Sand casting is one of the oldest casting techniques, dating back thousands of years and I use it frequently but here it feels quite potent in terms of its physicality, it involves pushing objects into the ground and exhuming them. Two of these aluminium forms have been hydro plated, and alongside the raw aluminium pieces they will undergo their own changes of state through exposure to the elements, whether that’s the humidity of the air or rain or materials local to the site which will then degrade, tarnish or patinate each object as a reflection of their own life spans within the site.

I’ve also used cast HDPE which is high density polyethylene, that’s an incredibly inert man made synthetic material that will take far longer than human or animal bodies to decompose, although it is incredibly recyclable. So that’s another interesting point of tension between scales and breakdowns that I wanted to explore within the setting of Rookwood. 
The third and fourth forms have been taken directly from Egyptian and Roman sarcophagi, which I’ve then flattened, stretched and cut up before being 3D printed and cast. The second form is taken from a model of the common Earthworm that has been scaled up to match the size of the first form, which is essentially an open casket that has been scaled down from the average size of an adult Human body. So again, there’s an interplay of tensions between what would commonly be accepted as having place within the Earth and the active and passive elements of tending to the Earth and how different bodies operate under the surface. 

I think ultimately, I want the works to be honest, I want them to be objects on their own terms evoking new types of feelings, that let us contemplate on the fact that as humans we are bodies, and they are subject to the same laws as everything else. And building on that I was interested in making works that had a key function, but that function would be missing a key component which is of course the body and how through the absence of these bodies the forms take on their own agency.