Declan Yert is an artist currently living and working in Syracuse, NY

My sculptures utilize the discarded and forgotten to create new meaning and form. With my hands and body, I collect, archive, and utilize scrap and found materials. These materials’ meanings and uses are disguised when found; only assumptions of narrative exist. Combined, assembled, and reworked the materials become part of a larger whole; a new object - a new reality. Inspired by natural growth systems and human interactions alongside and against those systems, I use my hands and body once more to disguise the newly formed assemblages- revealing unlike connection points and upholding the unknown and uncertain. Figures, curio-objects, windswept detritus, beautifully grotesque assortments divulge during the creation process. I use scrap wood, found metals, readymade objects, and salvaged fabrics as a structure for the handmade disguises of plaster, paper pulp, industrial materials, and dyes. Confronting, ephemeral, grounded, passive, certainly uncertain sculptural objects emerge; and in an instant my own hand and body disappears as the sculptures become something other than the discarded, forgotten, collected, and archived. They stand, hang, balance, and protrude as exactly part of this earth, and completely alien to our material, object, and definable vocabulary or perception.