FLORIAN OKWU
Among all forms of creative expression, sculpture is my favorite. It engages the entire self, blending mind and body into one concentrated, demanding tool. Through it’s labor I discover a deep appreciation for humanity. It immerses me in the roots of civilizations and, fundamentally, the core questions of what it means to be a human being. What most interests me, though, apart from the sensual pleasures and physical toils of creation, are the mental ephemera and philosophies woven into the carving process.
Carving serves as a perfect analogy for our own lives and identities: The raw and formless materials, full of untapped potential destined to meet the hands of ambitions, fears, and inexplicable urges to create meaning: To give purpose to life... It's in this purpose that art speaks loudest for me, made from necessity, to calm, actualize, to understand oneself and the world around them. I feel strongly that it brings an immense satisfaction to the endless task of satiating those primal desires. Not only does a fully weighted strike of a mallet, or the resistance of a sharp blade on wood better exemplify the struggle of pursuing these desires, but the resulting objects provide physical proofs of the struggles taken to do so. It is through these objects that I understand the stages of my life, and it is in their documented existence that I can not only remember, but visualize my path through it. They are chapters, or episodes which mark, externally, my visual or aesthetic drives from any given moment, but internally, the underlying guiding principles which dictate my daily life. The obsessive need for symmetry, a harmonious visual balance, or the smoothness of a surface... Although superficial in the literal sense, these needs tell a deeper story about my own mental landscape, and my relationship with ideals unworthy of chasing if not for the private sandbox of an artistic practice.
What is most beautiful to me about sculpture is its 3 dimensionality. A sculpture can hold presence, and our minds engage with it the way we might a person, a pet, a structure. A sculpture offers the artist an opportunity to reshape the fabric of this world, creasing it in ways to reveal what they’ve been hiding on the paper shell inside their minds. These objects come to life, and in growing into their bodies they learn to exist inside this world, just as you or I. Like us, a sculpture is limited by its form, but these limitations are the doorways to understanding its relationship with the world. In shape, we find subtleties, hidden seeds embedded into form which grow for every person a different tree. There is no one meaning attached to the abstract works I make... the meaning is in my intention to create them and the rest is left to time, and those who meet them along the way.