Iris Hu

Untitled, 2019

Mixed Medium: mesh fabric, acrylic, wire, beans, rice, orange peels

Mother, stretch my hand, 2019

Mixed Medium: latex, baby powder, soil, grass, rocks, bunny fur

Untitled 2019,

Mixed Medium: latex, wire, acrylic

No Place like Home, 2019

Photograph
24 x 36

Artist Statement

In my practice, I want to explore the parallel relationship between caterpillar metamorphosis and human transformation. When the caterpillar forms a cocoon, it undergoes the process of cannibalism by eating its own organs before completing metamorphosis. When a human baby is born, the baby undergoes a series of physical, mental, and emotional stages of transformations that in result turns it into a hybrid/mutant. The society milks the baby, grows the baby and in the end – dissects the baby into bits of fragments. The relationship continues when the baby becomes an adult; its head and body slowly grow into the site of a haunted house; without an address. As time goes on, the house becomes the baby and the baby becomes the house itself.

As an artist who is obsessed with aggressive textures, forms, materials, and colors, I enjoy making sculptures, installations, photographs, and short films with a wide range of traumatic narratives. In my sculpture works, I often use latex, wire, soil, beans, plants and other organic components to recreate the juxtapositions between the soft and rigid; heavy and light; bright and dark; living and dead. The duplication of colors, and red in specific, in result becomes a mutant of conflicting identities space is no longer a space; the body is no longer a body.