Doris Arkin

Doris Arkin works with found construction materials, hardware supplies, and abandoned debris that undergo a contextual transformation in her studio. These harsh materials are not anonymous; rather, they are treated as a mess comprised of thousands of events, a natural resource. Their appearance in her work is an intuitive byproduct of frequent random encounters. Each material is processed by Arkin in a wounding and strenuous sculptural process, to create a deceiving effect of seducing softness. The duality of her sculptural objects lays in the way their meaning changes when observed from changing distances.

Arkin’s sculptures contain the accumulation of time, as she is invested in toiling processes, embedding notions of slowness, traces of damage, reconstruction, and human ambivalence. Her work process resembles a ritual fraught with meaning, articulating the gathering and erasing of memories which fabricate one’s sense of self. The initial dissipation of the materials, their malleability, and later on, their reemergence in a sculptural form, constitutes a circulate practice that offers both material and emotional reformation. Arkin stitches and unstitches private and collective moments, making her way through mental processes to another realm, which is a place of her own invention.

CV