Robot dinosaurs.  Flying tractors.  Motorcycles and rocket ships hidden in the secret chambers of Arthurian castles.  Legos were my childhood obsession.  As I recall, I spent days on end completely immersed in the worlds I created, worlds filled with incredible machines and fantastic creatures.  Awareness gradually dawned that the joy I experienced during my playtime was contingent not upon the Legos, but on the creation of a tangible object, the physical manifestation of an idea from my imagination.

 

Legos were my creative launching pad.  From there I moved into drawing, which led to photography and, later, to painting.  After high school, I enrolled at Azusa Pacific University to formally study art.  It was there that I learned to express myself through sculpture.  In 2006, I received a BA in Art with emphases in painting and sculpture.

 

I now work in figurative bronze sculpture.  It is the solidity of bronze, its strength and durability, which attracts me to it.  The stationary, inflexible nature of metal sculpture allows a tiny portion of life to be captured and removed from its inherently fragile, temporal existence.  Thus removed, it can be examined in detail, considered from multiple angles.  Life moves so fast that we miss much of what is going on right around us.  Events flash before us and disappear in an instant.  My sculpture is a means of taking hold of fleeting slivers of life, that we might examine them and, perhaps, begin to move towards a deeper level of understanding.

 

The unique beauty and complexity of the human form, coupled with its expressiveness and capacity for both drama and subtlety, have secured a place for the figure at the core of my art.  Beyond these qualities, it is the profound value of that which the human body represents that continues to fascinate and leave me in a state of awe.  I strive always to treat the human figure with respect, remembering the importance of what it stands for and the power held within it.

 

Inspiration comes to me from the people living and moving around me.  Sometimes it is a certain mannerism seen in someone that catches my attention, or a subtle expression or bit of body language.  This is what feeds my art.  At other times, it is an entire outlook on life that provides the motivation for a body of work.  I seek not to capture or recreate a single, unique moment, but to explore a universal thought or action to which others can relate.  My art is about the underlying cause of the action rather than the end results of it.  It deals with the physical and psychological struggles that afflict real people in the world today.  It is about human emotion expressed or, more interestingly, withheld.

 

Malachi Elledge