Danni O'Brien

Lives and works in Baltimore, MD, USA

Artist statement

I transform scavenged home goods into speculative, absurd, amalgamated sculptures. Collected, forgotten domestic ephemera is accumulated through dumpster diving, Craigslist free ad scouring, and direct donations. Tinkering with these salvaged objects, I transform their disjointed segments into works that morph and slip into plant anatomies, bodies, machines, and their hybrids. Queer in their irreverence and material misbehavior, my sculptures embody playful dysfunction and the promise of hybrid potential. I assemble discarded at-home exercise equipment and other cast-offs into cyborgian creatures. These rarely used, often broken, brightly colored apparatuses are grafted with organic and natural forms. "Organic" forms emerge from cast wax replicas of faux rock yard concealers, solar-powered rock lights, and gourds. I cultivate gourds from seed, then dry, resurface, and create molds from them to cast replicas in recycled candle wax and aluminum. Simultaneously phallic and breast-like, smooth and warty, these forms serve as proxies for bodies in flux and transformation. My process cycles between deconstruction and reconstruction, mirroring queer identity formation and world-building. Through acts of counterbalancing, pressure fitting, and cantilevering, the sculptures remain precarious, foregrounding instability, maintenance, and vulnerability. I minimally alter the surfaces of found materials, allowing their original histories to remain legible, generating uncanny encounters...

Artwork