Rubber Band Ball
Rubber Band Ball, 2022. Stone carving on Rosa Portogallo marble. ~50 cm diameter.
A rubber band ball certainly is a trivial object. It has no clear purpose and yet it requires some work to assemble all the rubber bands into a sphere—a tedious and useless process. The only hope to bring this aimless object out of the ordinary is to make it big enough so that it carves itself a place among the biggest recorded rubber band balls—even then, there is still something pathetic and tragic about it.
The rubber band ball that was used as model for this carving was created from three years' worth of fruit and vegetable rubber bands. It is an object that can be thought of as a measure of time, an archive, and an atlas documenting some fleeting aspects of everyday life. Enlarged to the width of my shoulders and carved from a block of flesh-coloured rosa portogallo marble, this piece acquires a human-like presence while pointing to both Atlas’s globe and Sisyphus’s boulder.
Special thanks to Jules Beauchamp Desbiens, Gabriel Ferri, Andrea Rossi, Igor Baisi, and the team at Garfagnana Innovazione.
Documentation of the carving: Hillel O’Leary.
The artist acknowledges the support of Arts Nova Scotia for the realization of this work.
