Sarah Perry Sculpture

Sarah Perry (American, b. 1956) is known for her ingenious animal-inspired sculptures that rely heavily on an array of found objects. She scavenges for materials, such as discarded truck tires or sun-bleached bones, and then skillfully transforms them into works of art that “communicate [her] subtlest emotions and deepest beliefs succinctly.”[i] The final result “can be [as] frightening as an uncensored dream, touch on the unknowable, or reflect the human capacity for awe.”[ii] In some cases humor can creep in as well.[iii] Over the years Perry has developed “her own distinct visual language, based on forgotten histories and the artist’s constant exploration of our universe, both terrestrial and celestial.”[iv] 

EARLY YEARS

As a young girl Perry created things with seeds, grasses, and other natural materials that she found in her backyard.[v] Also, she remembers being drawn to “icky” stuff like bones, lizard skins, and bugs.[vi] Perry’s conservative parents thought this went “too far,” but she says she “swayed” them because they frequently liked what she made.[vii] By high school she was drawing very realistically and she seriously considered becoming a scientific illustrator. However, this idea was abandoned when Perry realized her true “love is sculpture.”[viii] She naturally “thinks in sculptural terms” and “just see[s] things three-dimensionally.”[ix] Perry attended the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, California and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1983.[x] At Otis, “her childhood penchant for found objects returned” and she began combining this interest with “new techniques, new media, and new ideas.”[xi]

Following graduation Perry “burst onto the Los Angeles arts scene” with the creation of a group of gorilla sculptures.[xii] These life-sized apes were made of layers of old discarded car and truck tires that she found along the side of the freeway. Perry carefully arranged and fitted these rubber cast-offs over detailed welded steel armatures. The idea for these works came to her after seeing piles of trash along the highway and thinking “all this refuse is going to come back and haunt us.”[xiii] In Perry’s mind her “man-beasts” of accumulated rubber waste are rising up and making us “look at the carnage we wreak.”[xiv] She focused on the gorillas for about four years. Perry’s final work in the series was the 700-pound Gorilla Route #40, nicknamed Bill. The Los Angeles Times called this sculpture a “virtuoso performance” that truly “resonated” with audiences.[xv]

ASSEMBLAGE

The term assemblage was coined in the 1950s by the artist Jean Dubuffet to describe an art form that combines materials such as found or purchased objects. However, he was not the first to embrace this approach. As you study Perry’s body of work you cannot help but also think of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades or Louise Nevelson’s monochromatic constructions made of scavenged lumber and other discarded wooden objects.

In California assemblage was a particularly important genre. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, artists, like George Herms or Edward Kienholz, “led the parade” creating compositions of “freely associated materials.”[xvi] These works could be “droll, provocative, witty, satirical – and sometimes, beyond the artist’s control.”[xvii] Perry, however, has been linked to a second generation of Los Angeles assemblage artists which includes individuals such as John Frame and Alison Saar. They garnered attention in the 1980s for their works that “cut, sawed, whittled, sanded, braided, and reshaped” found objects into “a recognizably different artifact[s].”[xviii]

While Perry acknowledges that she has “roots in assemblage,” “[she] no longer considers [herself] an assemblage artist.”[xix] This is because the found objects in her creations are “so altered and so sculpted” that she feels her work at this point “goes beyond” that original definition.[xx] If she had to pick a label for herself, it would be sculptor.