It seems like everyone else knows all about Petah Coyne, she has an amazingly informational Wikipedia page and tons of images on Google – I love it. Her sculptures include tons of different regular and not so regular materials as well as taxidermy animals, wax, repetitive patterns, etc.
You can see in this close up that much of her items are literally coated in wax.
Many of her works are also suspended above the floor. In this case, the one on the left looks like a blackened heart or other organ to me. According to her Wikipedia page, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art cited her as part of, “a generation of sculptors—many of them women—who came of age in the late 1980s and forever changed the muscular practice of sculpture with their new interest in nature and a penchant for painstaking craftsmanship, domestic references and psychological metaphor.” I think perhaps I need to take a closer look at the period from which a lot of the artists I blog about come out of.
I wish I’d known that she had a recent show at MassMoCA, I definitely would have gone. I think I need to sign up for more news from the nearby museums.
I love the above sculpture – I like that it takes up more of the room than just the place where the piece lives and that it looks like something just covered in naturally-colored barnacles.
How beautiful is this. I’ll definitely be trying to keep better track of Petah now too 
Tags: 3D, materials, repetitive, sculpture, wax
Sonya
“forever changed the muscular practice of sculpture” that is such a great line!
Kate Post author
So great, I agree! I’m blown away by the size and weight of her pieces.