‘BBBS’ BRONZE PATTERN FOR DIGITAL AVATAR (1 OF 1 ONLY)
Bronze, Lost Wax process, 60cm. 2022
'BBBS' is the feline alter-ego of Leonie Rhodes. A mercurial cat, real-world and metaphorical, positive and negative for the artist, this dichotomous misfit 'other' emerged in adolescence as a protective mechanism and developed into a DJ-persona.
The sculpture is a phygital-meta-portrait of this subversive sonic-self. Inspired by ‘The Gayer-Anderson Cat’ (a stolen, colonially-named Egyptian bronze) Leonie hand-modelled the figure in clay, took a mould and made a wax version, which was cast at Perides Foundry and finished by hand. The hardness and historical power of the material and it’s grey-patina safely camouflage the figure in concrete environments like those where the character’s street savvy demeanour was originally forged.
The bronze was scanned and uploaded into the Metaverse as a 3-dimensional digital object. This avatar transforms with its environment, adopting surrounding imagery to grow new coats. Looking back to a lineage of traditional material practices, the sculpture leans towards the emergent Metaverse, historically prefiguring a virtual identity just ahead of the digital-economy assigning one. It celebrates the autonomy, equity and transfiguration possible in a progressive socio-virtual reality, as envisioned by internet pioneers, while facing the precarity of our multifaceted psyches within arenas infiltrated by gangs of corporations, meta-algorithms and dangerous disinformation.
Images by Meg Keene and Marie Pantaleon.