Carole Halle is a sculptor living and working in Brooklyn New York. Her project as a resident at BCAC is a large sculpture titled “Corporeal Merger”, made of foam and covered with cement. She sculpted the foam during the summer of 2018 and will return in the spring of 2019 to cover it with cement.

“It was a pleasure to spend two months at Buffalo Creek Art Center. The opportunity to create a large piece for the park was what attracted me. Working outdoors all day facing the mountains will stay with me for some time. The location of the ranch between the mountains and the desert and facing the valley is outstanding. The living facilities are impressive too and I will miss the view from the house. I was fortunate to be with a stimulating and friendly group of artists that I hope to stay in touch with. The caretakers were generous and kind to us. All my thanks to Steve Hardy for making this possible.”

– Carole Halle

About Carole’s sculpture Corporeal merger:

Corporeal merger is a sculpture that embodies my fascination with the physicality of the human body in its many forms. It is the largest piece in a series of works that I have been creating in recent years.

Flesh is one of the most familiar elements in the landscape of our human experience.
The state it is in (young, old, wounded, etc.) evokes all sorts of references in our personal journey. The depiction of it in its different states carries an emotional charge. I use flesh as a metaphor for our human predicaments.

The representation of flesh, even in an abstract form, can hardly be isolated from the forces that our bodies are subjected to, such as gravity, or the relationship of muscles to bones and skin, or the physical changes it undergoes when subjected to pressure.

Stemming from my past as a dancer comes my fascination for the body and my interest in exploring how movement and rhythm can become part of a language of forms.

This piece depicts an accumulation of “bodies” without an obvious definition of each form. Whether the creatures are climbing on top of one another, nestling or pushing each other trying to escape an unknown threat is not explicit. They are emerging from the ground pushing upwards, while gravity is simultaneously pressing the volumes downwards. The fleshy mountain evokes the instinct of group survival, of merging of the individual into the collective.