Going, Going, Gone (detail), Sweetie Pie, Gallery 76102, Fort Worth, TX, 2013

sugar, sugar cubes and found cast iron object

My husband Jerry was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2010. In the wake of his diagnosis and first craniotomy and first year-long round of chemo, I started making sculptural pieces from sugar. The first one I made was a portrait bust of him, cast in sugar, with an IV drip suspended over it, slowly eroding the bust one drop at a time. It was a little too on the nose, no pun intended. It takes a lot to horrify an entire class of fine art graduate students, usually a comparatively weird bunch of people, but that did it. So, I started experimenting with still using sugar as a medium – because it was a PERFECT medium to talk about slow mortality, the fragility of life, the bittersweetness of life, etc. – but making the representations a lot less literal. This is one of the pieces from that series. It began as set of three pink sugar heart boxes placed on a little Victorian white iron stand that had three shelves. On the bottom shelf the box was pristine and intact. One the middle shelf the lid was cracked and on the top shelf the box was as you see it pictured above, busted open with the contents spilling out. As one of my classmates pointed out in critique, even a good love can break your heart.