Sculpture by Jonathan Sterner 1993
Hello this is Jonathan Sterner, and this is the story of the sculpture named Pauper’s Grave.
This stone figure was created in early, 1993 as part of my college course work as a Sculpture student. The female form was created as a life casting, the model was a friend and fellow student.
In the early 1990s there were no digital cameras available for documenting my work, the most common form of documenting one’s portfolio was to take photographs on film and to create slides. This is the slide I took in 1993, during an art show exhibition at the college of DuPage in Illinois.
Let me take a moment to explain what a life casting is and how it was created. A life casting is simply the practice of creating a mold of a living model. In this case to create a full body, casting with very little detail. I used a large piece of fabric to cover the model, except the models head. The main idea was to create a torso of rocks made of cement. When mixing the concrete I used two kinds of cement pigment, gray and red.
The sculpture was created by placing condoms filled with cement in the casting, stacking them up until they took on the shape of the human figure you see now.
Fast forward 30 years, the piece has been on display only two times until today. The first was during my coursework in college the second time as an extended stay in a small garden, and then it was placed in storage for the remainder of that time.
As you look inside, the blue storage box on wheels it’s a pile of rocks. The only reference to put this puzzle back together again is that slide from 30 years ago.
I have sped up the video of the installation as it took a while to find the right pieces of the sculpture to put it all back together again. The purpose of this video, just like the film slide used to document the sculpture when I was in college, is to document the installation of the sculpture so that I can remember how it goes together.
Once it’s been reassembled, I’m planting a flower around the sculpture. Hopefully the flowers envelops and partially cover the sculpture over the years.
This is one of my favorite sculptures that I’ve ever created. Interactive and hands-on a true puzzle.
Feel free to leave a comment and ask questions, I’ll do my best to respond.