Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: The Work of Tara Donovan

I have always loved Tara Donovan's artwork, they way she makes such breathtaking work with such simple materials. She received the 2008 MacArthur “Genius” grant, and an exhibition just opened in Boston to spanning a decade of her work.
This is an abridged version of an interview between Lawrence Weschler and Tara Donavan that appears in the monograph, Tara Donovan. (Via Design Observer)

Lawrence Weschler:
So you graduated from the Corcoran. Then what happened?
Tara Donovan:
I waited tables for six years.
Then I started making this sculpture where I was filling balloons with sand. And, God, it’s really funny actually. They were these natural-color balloons. I realized that if you exposed them to sunlight, they would kind of turn these pinkish hues and you could get all this subtle variation in color. And I would sit at night watching TV with a funnel and a bucket of sand and I would fill these balloons with sand, knot them, and pin them to my wall. So I covered this entire wall in these sand-filled balloons. It was kind of the first big thing I’d ever made.
To conitnue reading the interview click here.