Talya Petrillo

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

My work is concerned with the impulse to organize, contain, and give structure to things that are inherently unstable. I approach this through a tactile and material language, where the process of making an object is as important as what it comes to signify. Through sculpture and installation, I use casting, wrapping, repetition, accumulation, and assemblage as ways of imposing structure. Breath becomes concrete. Paper becomes structural. Confetti becomes skin. Flowers are encased and connected. These transformations become a way of testing what an object can hold, preserve, or make physical. The resulting works often appear to follow an internal logic without making that logic entirely available. Forms can suggest architecture, bodily systems, or spiritual apparatus. They resolve as portions of something larger and functional, but not fully legible. Across the work, systems of order coexist with chance, decay, bodily evidence, and change. Rather than resolving these tensions, I construct arrangements around them, making structures that attempt to stabilize what is already in the process of becoming something else.

Artwork