Metamorphoses reconsiders the myth of Apollo and Daphne through an act of removal. In recreating Bernini’s sculpture and eliminating Apollo from the scene, I shift the work’s meaning away from pursuit, possession, and transformation as spectacle. Freed from Apollo’s grasp, Daphne is no longer trapped inside the logic of the myth or its repeated retelling. The work began with my interest in how cultural narratives continue to imprison their characters, preserving unequal power relations through art, history, and representation. By extracting Apollo, I want to recontextualize the story and imagine another possibility for Daphne: not as a victim fixed forever in flight, but as a figure released from the narrative that has defined her.
This video offerers a glimps into the making of one of my sculptures I created using google images of Baroque sculptures depicting the abduction of Goddesses. This clip shows one of the processes I use to remove the figures from the model. I erased the figure from each of the frames before processing the images in photogrammetry software to generate the 3d model.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Daphne without Apollo, 2020
PLA Filament and Gesso, 6"x8"x20"