Liz Larner

The working title for this sculpture is Untitled (wall) (2000/2001). It's the largest and, I think, the last in a series I've been working on since 1997. I started making things that could take up space without being solid, while working with different ideas of what—in three dimensions—constitutes density and mass. The third dimension still seems to me to be the place we tend to go for a sense of reality, often thought of with respect to sculpture as a sense of solidity—as if to say, "This thing is here with me in real space." I want to make sculptures that cause a sense of uncertainty about where something is or about how much space it is occupying without resorting to kinetics. This piece, for example, is a rather rigid object made of stainless steel, but as you move around it, it seems to shiver and shift. It's covered in paper and painted with watercolor and gouache so the surface is luminous, flat, soft, and somewhat fragile. (That's why, in this photo, I'm using a cloth to touch it.) Color is such an amazing and powerful entity. I've been drawn to color for a long time, and using it gives me a great deal of pleasure. Color can be fairly unruly to work with— so changeable in relation to other colors and capable of creating form by itself. I like to use color to engage and alter the perception of the sculpture's form. The shiver, deceptive depth, and movement in this sculpture are due largely to the color.