Leland F. Prince
Starting at age 14, I worked with my father, Douglas F. Prince, in his concrete brick company Castone. He was the owner of the largest brick manufacturing plant in Texas in his day. I spent most of my teenage years working in this industrial environment with earplugs in. Because of this heavy industrial environment, I found myself more often than not, alone inside my head, working very hard at my father’s brick company making, stacking, and loading bricks on trucks.
My objects are built in sections on a table horizontally. I press clay into life size molds of the human figure and add the structure of a block or brick like part. I then remove the large block like sections from the mold and stack one section on top of the other vertically forming a figurative and architectural structure. In addition, I make use of industrial nostalgia by modeling I-beams as part of the structure of the stacked sections. I also fire nuts and bolts in the clay that build the surface of the human form.
I build architectural images that are dependent on the human form. The essence of my work includes using the fragmented human form, hand built with in an architectural structure. The process of constructing in sections, and stacking vertically hundreds of pounds of clay is also a type of performance that takes me back to the place of my youth, manufacturing brick. Hand building with clay is a place of stillness for me, in the flow of this strangeness that is the human experience. My human architectural forms come from a lonely place inside my head and the memory of a brick manufacturing plant Castone.
