Artist uses bottles to create body

Plastic makes it possible
Artist uses bottles to create body

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

More than 15,000 plastic bottles currently fill the Rice University Art Gallery, creating a maze of color and light set to represent organic structures and forms of the human body. In “The Great Indoors,” on view through Oct. 26, artist Aurora Robson highlights the microscopic molecular and cellular “machines” constantly at work within the body.

	More than 15,000 plastic bottles currently fill the Rice University Art Gallery, creating a maze of color and light set to represent organic structures and forms of the human body.

Visitors can enter the gallery through membrane-like, translucent tunnels and walk toward a dome-like space, or they can exit the tunnels into an open space filled with suspended sculptures containing solar-powered LED lights causing them to glow. The installation is painted in tints of red, orange, yellow, pink and fuchsia, alluding to the colors within the human body.

“‘The Great Indoors’ is a landscape and a living organism,” Robson said. “There’s an internal wilderness in action as we speak.”

Attracted by the idea of reuse, Robson let the shape and thickness of each bottle determine how she cut it. Then, using heat and at least 55,000 rivets, she constructed and painted lavishly detailed organic forms, which bring to mind deep-sea creatures, jungle plants and microorganisms. Such allusions to hidden worlds are fitting since it is childhood dreams of oozing blobs and strings that Robson names as the source of all her work.

Since 2004, Robson has used discarded plastic water bottles as her sculptural medium. In the past year alone she intercepted 20,000 bottles from becoming landfill.

Robson was born in Toronto and graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University. She is a certified structural welder and for many years ran her own welding studio in New York, where she has lived for the past 18 years. Robson recently completed “What Goes Around Comes Around,” a large-scale suspended sculpture commissioned by Merrill Lynch for its headquarters in Hopewell, N.J.

Rice Gallery exhibitions and programs receive major support from Rice Gallery patrons and members, the Brown Foundation Inc., the Louisa Stude Sarofim 1995 Charitable Trust and the Kilgore Endowment. Exhibition catalogues are funded in part by the Robert J. Card, M.D., and Karol Kreymer Catalogue Endowment. The gallery receives partial operating support from the city of Houston. KUHF-FM and Saint Arnold Brewing Company provide in-kind support.