A Baby in Red: The Emergency Room

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A Baby in Red: The Emergency Room by Kevin N. Supple
(Plastic Doll, Steel, Wood, Oscillating Fan Motor, Cloth, Rope: 20"x12"x12", February 17th, 2011)
(Sculpture made for Intermediate Sculpture class at UAlbany)
Special thanks to my neighbors for donating this doll because "...[it is so creepy...we want it out of our house]..."

This sculpture was made for my Intermediate Sculpture class at UAlbany. We were to start with a memory of a place and recreate the feeling of that place without actually recreating the place itself. We were encouraged to use this as a "jumping off point".

The memory I chose was from when I was rather young. When I was five I was playing under my brother's crib, while under the crib I absentmindedly pulled the lever to drop the crib gate and the gate came down upon my head. This particular crib gate had an odd piece of metal on the bottom which got me in the head and gave me a rather painful wound worthy of a trip to the emergency room. I don't remember much of the emergency room but I remember it was a scary place for me; I tried to recreate this feeling in my piece and believe I have done so accordingly.

Making this piece was a disturbing journey that began the second I began to remove the dolls hair. Removing the hair from a doll is not a fun thing to do, it's kind of gross. This was then followed by the act of sawing the doll into pieces, equally disturbing. After disassembling the poor doll I felt rather...wrong, luckily I came up with the idea to dehumanize the thing. By incorporating a motor along with wires and other electrical odds and ends I found my job to be much easier; no-longer did I feel like a madman, I was now a scientist working on a cyborg. Now I could continue. The rest of the job wasn't too bad since I now had a cool cyborg baby. Unfortunately, the problem with cyborg babies is that once you bring them home and leave them in a duffel bag in your living room for a week you kind of become afraid to look at it again. That thing is so weird, there is no way I'm putting that thing up on my fridge. I guess I'll put it in the basement for now; I can use it as a Halloween decoration. I just hope it doesn't come alive like in Toy Story.

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