My Little Phony

                                                                             is a ceramic sculpture realized through a performative working process carried out in public during an exhibition at Forum Box gallery in 2020. Rather than presenting a finished object, the work foregrounded its own making, situating artistic production as a durational, relational, and contingent event.

The sculpture was hand-built on site over the course of the exhibition, remaining deliberately unfinished and unfired at its conclusion. This suspended state emphasized process over completion and shifted attention from the object's final form to the conditions under which it emerged. Visitors encountered the work not as a resolved statement, but as an evolving situation, shaped by time, repetition, interruption, and social presence.

Modelled after a mass-produced My Little Pony figure from the 1980s and enlarged to near bodily scale, the sculpture translated a familiar object of childhood into a slow, labor-intensive act of construction. The figure's recognizability functioned as an entry point, while its gradual materialization exposed the tension between affective familiarity and ideological formation. What is often perceived as benign, playful, or harmless revealed itself as a carrier of cultural scripts learned early and repeated uncritically.

The exhibition functioned simultaneously as a workspace and a site of encounter. Conversations with visitors unfolded alongside the making of the sculpture, allowing observation of how audiences project meaning, expectation, and narrative onto a work that is still in formation. The artist's presence remained visible and continuous, underscoring authorship as something enacted rather than asserted.

My Little Phony operated as a prelude and rehearsal for the later installation C'mon, Follow Me Across the Rainbow and I'll Show You the Way to the Dream Valley. Themes of collectivity, guidance, submission, and affective persuasion emerged gradually through the process, informing the conceptual and material direction of the subsequent herd installation. In this sense, the work functioned less as an autonomous sculpture than as a testing ground for ideas, forms, and modes of address.

Although initiated as a time-bound performance, the sculpture itself remained open-ended. Its completion extended across several years, incorporating firing, surface treatment, and the eventual addition of mane and tail. This prolonged duration reinforces the work's resistance to closure, positioning it as an accumulation of actions, decisions, and delays rather than a singular event.

[My Little Phony. Process-based performance, ceramic sculpture. Height at the withers ca. 80 cm. Stoneware, engobes, clear glaze, pearl lustre, horsehair, silk. 1200 °C, oxygen, 2020-2026.]

In a private collection.