"In my on-going Christmas Tree Series, I use discarded Christmas trees that I scavenge from the NYC streets each January. The act of resurrecting a tree and giving it a new life as a sculpture gives me a chance to ponder how human beings impose an order--our order--on the universe. I am curious about our human need to shape or control nature. Though such "heavy" thoughts spur me to create, I aspire towards lightness and even playfulness in my work--that impish humor found in the branch that defies the gardener's shears." Ilene Sunshine/September 2001 Ilene Sunshine employs natural and man-made materials in her sculptures to convey a poetic synthesis of the cultivated and the constructed. |