Sculptor Ralph Eaton’s first large-scale site-specific museum project draws from nearly three decades of “laying bare the absurdities” of our culture’s fascination with “junk.” Commissioned by the Taubman Museum of Art, Fuzzy Kudzu (2013-14) transforms the City of Roanoke Atrium into an otherworldly fantasyland, where a thirty-foot cascade of white furry tendrils made from restructured stuffed animals spills over the central balcony, countering the building’s architecture in ways both welcoming and unsettling. The title of the monumental work refers to the Kudzu plant familiar to any Southerner, an invasive summertime vine that enshrouds anything in its path. Likewise are we as a culture being overtaken by mass-produced stuff. “We are a dysfunctional species,” Eaton declares, “and my work is about finding the humor and beauty in the absurdity of it all.”
Fuzzy Kudzu is stitched almost entirely from used stuffed animals donated by the local Roanoke Goodwill. Most of its “pelt” is recycled from discarded teddy bears, bunnies, and kittens, each taken apart by the artist and reassembled into over fifty “vines” ranging from twenty to thirty-four feet. Weighing nearly a ton, Fuzzy Kudzu is comprised of faux fur fabric, polyester fiberfill, and more than one thousand stuffed animals. Open for interpretation, the resulting shape can be seen as a waterfall, tree trunk, or column—something immediate and organic, yet elegantly classical. Like much site-responsive sculpture, it also morphs with changes in light, be it the movement of the sun or black lights trained across its soft, articulated surfaces. (
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