Molly Blumberg is an artist based in Chicago, IL and Boston, MA. She earned her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in fiber & material studies in 2020 and her BFA from the Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts in sculpture in 2012. Trained as a sculptor and a papermaker, her work is grounded in an extreme engagement with materiality. Through a playfully physical studio practice and a dedication to process based exploration, she explores how it feels to be a body. Pulling from art-historical depictions of the female body and employing feminist practices of fragmentation and reassembling, she focuses on the phenomenology of a fleshy body that is a site of constant state change.
"My sculptural practice explores the spaces between our human bodies and the materiality of lived environments. As a body can melt into a couch, lean against a wall, or brace against the wind, my work exists in these moments of potential permeability where our bodies are not so separate from the objects and contexts of our surroundings. Skins of handmade paper swallow household items, broken chairs prolapse bodily blobs of rubber, nylon bulges, plaster seeps, pigments bleed and blend. In these moments, materials thoroughly embody the experiences, sensations, and mechanics of bodies.
These sculptures - sometimes collages of pieces, sometimes autonomous beings - wrestle with figuration and fragmentation. Moments of specificity dissolve into formlessness, disrupting an understanding of a complete body and positioning the human body as a precarious and unpredictable material being. Pulling from art-historical depictions of the female body and employing feminist practices of fragmentation and reassembly, my work explores the phenomenology of a fleshy body that is a site of constant state change.
Many works are ambiguously bodily (simultaneously breasts, bellybuttons, anuses, ear canals), offering fleshy encounters with material that might make us blush or giggle. Yet we are left to question exactly what is so funny. Childhood curiosity and potty-humor go hand-in-hand: bodies can be the site of incredibly weird, funny, and joyful experiences before they become so loaded."
