Denise Fanning

What Should We Do? 2003
Installation photo.
The Great Weight State, 2003
Installation photo.


I’m Denise Whitebread Fanning, and I’m a sculptor. I primarily make object-based sculpture as well as large scale installations which often are comprised of many smaller objects produced in repetitive fashion to come together to create a larger environment. My work is very labor intensive and time consuming. I often spend six months to a year making a particular installation or a piece.

So this question of why I do what I do is something that is very present in my life, it’s something that continually plagues me, because I question it on many levels. Primarily just because of the incredible cost and time that is necessary to produce my work and the ephemeral nature of it, in that I spend a year making a piece, install it and then deinstall it, and its life has been brief and it’s now ended. And so I question why did I invest all that time into that piece and what does it mean for me? I guess ultimately I hope that on some level the viewer having been able to be a part of that installation because installation by nature engages the space and engages the viewer, and allows the viewer to become a part of the piece, I hope that the viewer will take that experience with them and it will remain somehow alive in them in a way that perhaps I can’t predict. I hope that the intellectual levels of the work will reach them but more so I hope that the visceral environment that I intended to create will remain with them on some greater level.