ELAINE DUIGENAN

WAX WORKS

 

What else appears so momentarily, has us enthralled and then disappears in ‘a burst of vanishing’?

 

A bubble is often seen as an analogy for the lightness and brevity of being.  Both delicate and volatile, it ‘lives’ a complete but transient existence; held under threat till pierced.

 

The ‘Wax Works’ take this ‘life’ and delineate its form.  By pouring wax into bubbles, the wax simultaneously bursts the bubbles and takes their space leaving us unsure as to whether we see the bubble or the burst. 

 

Duigenan has experimented with numerous waxes and modes of ‘cooking’.  The resulting images are of tiny sculptures that are both ‘out of this world’ and part of it. 

 

They preserve a space that barely existed.