my name is Casey cook and I am an artist
in the area 919 show at the National
Museum the two sculptures that are out
here are large cardboard sculptures
originally I made these as maquettes for
much larger sculptures that i want to
make cardboard was an amazing material
to work with I liked the idea that they
were made out of boxes that had traveled
somewhere that had a story but then was
being made into a completely different
thing that never existed before the
shapes come from each other you can kind
of see on some of the curves that maybe
that piece was cut out of the other
piece and then that left over negative
space at the time became the shape for
the next sculpture and I was really
interested in these if you will feminine
shapes I fell in love with the cardboard
I fell in love with how I could make a
drawing with a knife and cut out the
shape really fast how the cardboard
absorbs the paint and that's when I
created the piece that's all the way
inside the gallery mama bear baby bear
which is not a sculpture as much as a
painting on cardboard that's been cut
out and then put back together I was
flying in a tiny plane over islands like
tiny tiny little planes and I loved that
perspective of looking down and seeing
these kind of like outlines of island
shapes and I thought about what if there
was a giant sculpture or piece I could
make that fit into that landscape but
that was made by human so I do consider
some of the hourglass shape that could
be definitely related to the human body
for sure that was sort of a organic
shape that it repeats and a lot of this
body of work it also was sort of
representing in my mind the reproductive
system of the mama bear relating to the
relationship of the mother and the child
as animals and also humans I see it as
if mama bear is protecting baby bear but
if they're flipped around
be that the mama bear is attacking the
baby bear so there's definitely a story
in a relationship there we're not sure
if it's fear or if it's nurturing
protecting so it's sort of open in that
interpretation