Tara Donovan

For the last 20 years, the American sculptor Tara Donovan has been making art out of the artificial: plastic cups, drinking straws, Mylar tape, those mini golf pencils, even the humble Slinky toy. With these and an array of other materials, Donovan constructs site-specific works that recall landscapes or organic forms.

Donovan described pieces of her work and spoke about her creative process and philosophy, as well as the whole “starving artist” thing: “I started out working with mass-produced materials because they were what was accessible to me as a poor art student — they were cheap.”

“For this piece I started out working with index cards, but I can’t make art out of things that are going to disintegrate. So I sourced those styrene plastic cards, which I’d first worked with for an installation at Pace in 2014. I was particularly interested in privileging the edge of the card as a means to develop horizontal strata that would ascend. Within these materials there are these fugitive colors, blues and greens and yellows, that pronounce themselves when you’re looking at the edge even though they’re seemingly blank white cards when you look at them individually.”^[1]

This undulating lattice of Styrofoam drinking cups, with glowing hollows and pliable rims, was made to expand into the architecture of this particular space. To discover how they react to light and space in transcendent ways, Donovan experiments with huge volumes of manufactured materials. Clustered with an almost viral repetition, the cups assume forms that both evoke natural systems and seem to defy the laws of nature. “My work is mimicking the ways of nature, not necessarily mimicking nature,” she notes. Here, it might suggest cellular growth, or even the density of molecules in rolling clouds.^[2]