Yoko Kubrick
“My sculptures explore the aesthetic perceptions of forms found in nature and the emotional qualities of shapes, which I call “the emotive language of form.” I am curious about how the human mind perceives beauty, particularly from shapes found in nature. Plant life, water movement and land formations inform my visual vocabulary. I try to transmute these forms into stone using line, light, form and shadow to breathe life into material. I infuse my work with the archetypes and anthropomorphism found in Greek and Roman mythology. My sculptures thus become allegories. An abstraction of a river, a metaphor for its life giving waters, takes on the feminine curve of a woman’s hip.
It is fascinating to me that across different cultures and time spans, many familiar themes emerge from mythologies in terms of human archetypes, story structure, themes and the symbols contained within. The work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell explored these themes finding that it is likely that these similarities occur because they emerge from the part of our mind called the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is theorized to have evolved over human history in which cognitive structures called archetypes manifest imagery, motifs and symbols that appear to be common to cultures that have been separated by distance and time from hundreds to thousands of years. Similarly, in nature, we find certain patterns such as fractals and the Fibonacci spiral in elements as small as the DNA within our cells, to seashells, plants, patterns of weather, and even as vast as the shape of our milky-way and galaxy. Through my sculpture I seek to incorporate these symbols and stories to articulate the drama of human existence and our search for meaning in everyday life. I explore allegories and mythologies and transfer the emotions, symbols, and stories into sculpture, the fleeting and ephemeral into an enduring abstract form.”
Yoko Kubrick