ARTIST STATEMENT
This collection of small clay food has grown and grown throughout the pandemic. These objects were originally a break from making art and an attempt at subverting my own insistence that art must be “meaningful.” I think however that they have become the most meaningful work I make. I see them as my clown act, inviting the viewer to smile while telling a story about sadness.
The act of building in miniature is itself a response to neurosis. Miniatures are controllable, idealized worlds, and escapes from chaos and imperfection. They are Liliput. They are my urgency for rhythm/balance and my obsession with order.
By representing food, these sculptures also point directly at the human experience – the daily kind. They are about being female. They are escapees from a dollhouse, little, wild things fleeing domesticity. Neat and pretty, they are about composure, and how that composure falls apart. Perhaps they are even about me being a female giant, looking down over excess.
Food is an everyday mirror of pandemic trauma as well as a pervasive theme in female anxiety. From early 2020, we have found new fears about germs and about transforming bodies. What we cook and consume seems to be a constant fixation and judgment. I have lost so much of my appetite. These creations slink into view and remind me.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Allison Green is an art maker and art lover currently based in Queens, New York. Her work as costume maker has been in Broadway productions of Phantom of the Opera, Moulin Rouge, The Lion King, My Fair Lady, and others, as well as off-Broadway houses such as Sleep No More (New York NY). She designed costumes for UC San Diego Theater and Dance’s spring 2021 production of Uncle Vanya (San Diego CA) and was a 2020 exhibiting artist at Winterthur Museum’s needlework conference, The Inspired Needle (Winterthur DE)
Out side of professional garment work, her artistic practice centers craft as fine art, where it has long been ignored. Allison started as a home sewer in rural Vermont, taught by neighbors to spin, weave, felt, quilt, and macrame from the age she could read. Textile work has been passed hand to hand, almost entirely by women, creating heritages of storytelling and technique.
Allison is committed to practicing textile and craft as a global approach to art making (as opposed to a western-centric view) which enriches the experience of the maker and audience. Her work is about creating in-roads for any viewer to find delight and depth in the strange yet familiar. She draw on pattern, color, folklore, and humor, to create fantasies that are just barely recognizable.
© Allison Green