Petah Coyne’s Wax Sculptures and Installations Vacillate Between Beauty and Monstrosity

Each week, Petah Coyne reads two or three books. Along with film and the natural world, literature has had a profound impact on the artist throughout her decades-long career, as she references Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Zelda Fitzgerald, and numerous other women in her works. Coyne gravitates toward texts rooted in feminist principles, which she then puts into conversation and filters through large-scale sculptures and installations.

Dichotomies flourish in the artist’s practice as she suspends silk bouquets in specially formulated wax, dipping the vibrant blooms in a molten wash and often displaying them upside down. Many pieces capture the tension between preservation and loss and beauty and monstrosity, particularly as they relate to the complexity of women’s lives. The combination of myriad materials furthers this contrast, as the artist pairs luscious silks with paper towels, soft velvet with nuts and bolts, and shackles with woven tassels.

Installations like “Untitled #1103 (Daphne)” and the later “Untitled #1181 (Dante’s Daphne)” wind spindly branches, flowers, and artificial taxidermy around an undulating chicken wire armature. Sprayed with black paint, the dark, ominous works appear alive, as if crawling across the gallery to catch prey. The titles reference the Greek myth and the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree after attempting to escape Apollo’s unrequited love.

Similarly dynamic works include “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife),” which features hand-sewn Venetian velvet in sumptuous mounds of navy and black. The work shares a name with a 1966 novel by Sawako Ariyoshi, which fictionalizes the real story of a Japanese surgeon pitted between his wife and mother. As two statutory figures rise from the roiling mass, the artist stitches together a tapestry of conflict, forcing the pair to face off while the third player in the dispute remains unseen.

Championing women has always been an integral part of Coyne’s practice and life. In addition to her sculptural works, the artist is a longtime collaborator with the anonymous feminist collective Guerilla Girls. She and photographer Kathy Grove are behind a series of documentary portraits of each original member, creating an art historical record of the activist group.

Coyne will open a large solo show titled How Much a Heart Can Hold at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison this September, which will travel to the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, and Lowe Art Museum in Miami in the following years. Her works will also be included in several group exhibitions this fall, including at Grounds for Sculpture, Frost Art Museum, and Lehman College. Until then, explore Coyne’s vast oeuvre on her website and Instagram.

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