The Dominance of Negative Examples

Drop cloth, canvas, old clothes, oil paint, acrylic paint, wood, steel.
120″h 100″w 7″d
2024

Giant pushpins hold the canvas to the wall. As a character, Eeyore is always losing his tail, which is loosely attached with an “artist’s pin” (a pushpin) to his rear end. The large pushpins in this work show growth and age, like bodies, they got larger and marked by time. They are holding the canvas to the wall, much like Eeyore’s tail is held to his body, but because of their size there is a violence and permanence to their function here, as though a temporary solution has become a forever one.

Eeyore is a beloved character, but they are also an example of what to try to avoid becoming. There are few real examples of heroes in the world, and I’ve personally been guided in life more by examples of what I do not want to be. As we age we have a responsibility to turn our innocence into wisdom, or it will become ignorance that can be transferred onto others. 

This is a closeup of one of the oversized pushpins. I used my own old pushpins as references for each oversized one. 

The pushpins are large/grown, and in their largeness they make our bodies feel smaller when we see them, creating a reverberation within our psyche between past, present, and future selves. This is grounded by the normal scale of the clothes, and the inviting but ominous cartoon hand, scaled to interact with the large pins. Eeyore’s tail and pink bow can be found pinned to the underwear sewn into the canvas, further disrupting the sensations of a confused, and vulnerable, body and mind.