The Body is an Object Caught in Between
Sculpture
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

The Body is an Object Caught in Between examines gender, bodily dysphoria, desire, and self-reclamation through a sculptural environment that positions the body as both relic and site of conflict. The work places the body within a condition of suspension, where identity is negotiated between imposed structure and self-defined possibility.

Constructed from a glass cast of the artist’s vaginal cavity, dismantled furniture, faux leather, mirror, and metal hardware, the installation produces a form that is simultaneously phallic and vaginal. The materials generate a tension between exposure and containment, reflecting the artist’s attempt to understand themself within a rigid gender binary that could neither name nor validate their experience.

Within Three Tries: The Beginning, the work operates in dialogue with the installation’s broader framework, where sculptural elements parallel both the Stations of the Cross and Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stages. This piece corresponds to the anal stage (ages 1–3), a phase associated with control, regulation, and the development of autonomy. The work engages this framework through its emphasis on restraint, tension, and the negotiation between discipline and release, positioning the body within systems that attempt to structure and contain it.

The body is not presented as a stable truth but as a constructed and contested form, shaped by surveillance, categorization, and expectation.

The Body is an Object Caught in Between positions the body as a site where imposed meaning and self-definition remain in constant negotiation, foregrounding the complexity of reclaiming one’s form within systems that seek to regulate it.