Joyce McDaniel
Born 1936, Oklahoma City, OK, lives and works in Boston, MA
Letter to a Young Sculptor, 1996, steel, paper, bronze, Museum Purchase, 1997.20
Joyce McDaniel uses sculpture to communicate what words cannot say. Her works investigate forms of communication. In referring to this body of work, the artist poses several questions about communication: “What would a letter look like written in three dimensional space with physical materials? How does one give form to silence? What would a diary look and feel like weighed down with unwritten, unspoken ‘words’? Is a sculptor really a poet who works physically?”
In Letter to a Young Sculptor, the contrasting materials, textures, and weights act as metaphors for the tensions between writing and sculpting, and the sometimes frustrating prospect of trying to communicate richly and effectively in either medium. McDaniels’s work was purchased from the DeCordova exhibition 10 Artists/10 Visions: 1997.
