Paul Wirhun
Collage made of Eggshells: 'Skully 1'
2018

About the Item

I have worked on eggshells since I was a child, learning the traditional Ukrainian craft of pysanky from my mother. This artistic and cultic use of eggs informs my work to this day - as I believe that eggs are events - not simply objects. The shells (while the protective casing for the new life inside) are memories of the primal events that produced the eggs, intended as new life. To infuse new life into this ancient craft, I have manipulated traditional processes with innovative dyeing & brush techniques, scratching, and etching, to forge a new visual language to write on this versatile, organic sphere. Each egg is a spherical space, a continuously turning pictorial plane around which images distort, challenging common perceptions. The facility of the shell for a range of techniques (batiking, scratching, painting, gilding) affords me a great range of visual expression to manifest ideas, events, and fantasies. All this intentional imagery is created on a three-dimensional object that is so weightless in the hand as to affect a paradox of meaning, playing simultaneously with the egg as talisman and sculpture. Eggshells break! The detritus of broken shells has become new source material for collage, painting and eggshell encrusted sculptures. I have explored what eggshells do after epoxied to found wood, thus there is a recycling theme that has grown into my studio practice; the shells are reused as is the found wood. This studio expression has allowed me to explore what happens when things fall apart, and how we recreate our lives from the broken shards left behind. These new eggshell encrusted surfaces mimic the digitalization that appears in many new forms of art, yet these surfaces are what manifests when tiny pieces of fragile shells fracture into a new worldview – nothing is quite as it seems and something new appears. My studio motto has been: Ancient design for a new worldview. Little would I know that it would take broken eggshells as a metaphor to this world breaking apart, to find newer and truer meaning to this adage!

Creator:

Paul Wirhun (1961)

Creation Year:

2018

Dimensions:

Height: 13 in (33.02 cm)Width: 11 in (27.94 cm)

Medium:

Plaster,Wood,Mixed Media

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-