For more than two decades, Hudson Valley, NY sculptor Courtney Puckett has worked with what others throw away: broken furniture, household objects, and reclaimed textiles. Through patient, deliberate wrapping, she turns these discards into something entirely new.
Puckett builds each sculpture around an armature, a kind of skeleton, then wraps it in fabric until the structure underneath nearly disappears. That is where the transformation happens. For her, wrapping is never just surface. “Wrapping, or binding, functions as connective tissue and as repair,” she explained. “In other material cultures, it preserves or dresses wounds.” The pairing of hard and soft echoes “the relationship of bone to flesh, and of solidity to malleability,” she said.
Courtney Puckett holding one of her armatures. Photo credit: Willy Somma.
The Projector
Puckett was drawn to fabric early, in part because of its rebellious streak. Textiles carry “information about history and technology,” she said, and because fabric was long dismissed as domestic “women’s work,” using it as an art medium was once considered subversive. “That attracted me as a young artist, and for many years I committed to it as a primary medium,” she said. Her work draws on a tradition of everyday object-making passed down through generations of women in her family.
This year marks 10 years of Puckett’s Character series, human-sized sculptures with titles that suggest social or occupational roles: The Gardener, The Caretaker, The Griever. Now, she is revisiting them one by one. She draws a title at random, then makes free-associative lists and drawings linking it to earth, air, fire, and water. “From this practice poems emerge,” she said, “and gradually, visions take shape.”
Those visions have led her somewhere unexpected—animation. Puckett began learning digital animation software just over a year ago, placing her Character sculptures inside atmospheric environments built from color, texture, movement, and sound. The soundtracks are original compositions by her husband, artist and musician Colin O’Con.
The Second Overseer
Happy Sad Sense Defense
“The animations trade physical tactility for the possibilities within a digital space,” said Puckett. A filmmaker friend praised their “folk” quality, and Puckett sees the new medium as another kind of craft, one that raises fresh questions about our expectations of the virtual. Most of all, she said she relishes giving each sculpture “a temporary world where they can reveal more about themselves, what they do, why they exist, and where they might go next.”
Puckett’s newest work grows from five years of research into divination, especially tarot, the four classical elements and four cardinal directions. She said her sketchbooks and her Elemental Collage series, built from colored pencil, markers, graph paper, and found printed images, serve as “two-dimensional visual maps for working intuitively in three dimensions.”
Elemental Collage Installation
Why tarot? “Tarot offers me a system that is visual first,” she said. “It speaks in images and symbols, which is how I think and work.” She sees the deck itself as a kind of collage—”recycled and reinterpreted symbols passed down and reshaped over centuries.” Above all, it is open-ended. Rather than handing her fixed answers, tarot asks for intuitive interpretation, which mirrors how she builds sculpture: by feel, responding to materials as she goes.
From wrapped armatures to animated worlds, Puckett’s work keeps asking the same question in new forms: What else can an overlooked object become?
The Hippotenuse
The Hippotenuse (detail)
Courtney Puckett is an assistant professor and visual arts program coordinator at CT State Northwestern in Winsted, Connecticut. Her artist residencies include Yaddo, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Vermont Studio Center.
@courtneygpuckett
courtneypuckett.com
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Cami Smith is the Fiber Art Now media manager, community engagement coordinator, and a mixed-media artist.
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