Annabelle Anderson

BFA Sculpture

ARTIST STATEMENT: I initially sought to create fake religious relics. This fascination was left over from my experience of studying and living abroad in Florence, Italy for a semester before quarantine, and going to churches where there were heads and fingers of saints on display for followers to pay (sometimes, literally pay) pilgrimage to. The three-headed skull was this first I made with these ideas in mind- modern symbols of spirituality with historical references to religious traditions, all to hopefully reflect the viewer’s own beliefs about faith. Living in a famous renaissance city gave me a much more profound sense of “passed time,” something I did not have from growing up in the United States, where all of the art and architecture is only a few decades old. After taking a few art history classes, my sense and interest in ancient history started to go back further and further into human history, even to human prehistory. It seemed to me that we only have any understanding of these civilizations due to the megalithic structures they left behind, (such as the Pyramids, Gobekli Tepe, or Amazon earthworks) and we don’t know anything about them except that they are there. Besides these, the only idea we have of the art and architecture from North and South America are from obscure historical records written by explorers who were lucky enough to witness these civilizations before the Spanish Conquistadors spread disease and destruction that wiped out up to 99% of the population in some villages. It is these art pieces, origin myths, spiritual beliefs and practices that I began to focus on for my relic pieces, and the show came together as an archeology exhibit to display excavated artifacts from two ancient sites- the desert and the rainforest- located across the ocean from each other, but linked by the materials and artifacts. My aim still is to connect the present with the past, and to hopefully help fill in some of the gaps in our collective human history.