15. Marsha Pels

"Dead Mother. Dead Cowboy."

"Dead Mother. Dead Cowboy"

Marsha Pels is a contemporary sculptor who works with found objects and explores transforming them with a variation of different materials. Pels is well known for her labor-intensive cast and fabricated objects as well as multi-media installations. All of her works hold such strong meaning that obviously mean something specific to her but could be interpreted differently by the viewer. Pels’s recent work title “Dead Mother. Dead Cowboy” is about he mother and ex-husband and there is this eerie feel to it because many pieces feature a skeleton or pieces of one. Early on she did some site-specific worked in Edman, Germany where her ancestors are from and it was based off the Holocaust. Her work seems to be a mash up of things and I think she creates her works based of what she is feeling at the time.

Holocaust piece

I can’t decide how I feel about her work. She is very talented in her sculpture craft there is no doubt about that but some of her work leaves me confused. I appreciate the fact that she creates works that have a deep connection to her and it shines through in her pieces. There is this underlying theme of death in her work, at least to me, which I think is neat because it adds a whole new dimension and emotion to her work.  Pels is a talented artist and I enjoy her wide range of works and the oddness of it all.