ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is about contemporary labor. These abstractions are based in subversion of production manufacturing, injecting playful experimentation into relationship with material. The objects are industrial, produced by repetition pursuing deviation. Adaptation requires mutation; biological systems adapt, industrial systems do not. The iron castings include latitude and longitude coordinates. The coordinates, sites of creation, create maps of travel where the work was accomplished. The furnaces that produce the metal are named- identifying each as a metallurgical sample of the artist-built machine that produced it. The hand dyed fibers are a new inclusion in the series- tracking labor performed in my local landscape during the pandemic. I extracted invasive species and produced organic membranes to stretch within rigid structures.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Christyn Overstake is Assistant Professor of Art at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance, and serves the organization as Treasurer. She spent years working in industry as a MIG/TIG combination welder and fabricator, and currently explores the subversion of production manufacturing using industrial media. Her work has been shown throughout the United States. She received her BFA in sculpture from Northern Arizona University and her MFA in sculpture from Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi.
© Christyn Overstake