Im Petah Coyne, and today were here in my studio in New
York City
I gather materials from everywhere
Anywhere I go, I gather materials
I love materials
Materials, um, speak to me
When I start to build a piece, whatever is around me,
I pull in, I just start using
By the end, my studios full of things and thats how
the piece gets made
The older I get, the more stuff I have
Sculptors are hoarders [chuckles]
Were just polite hoarders
Were allowed to be hoarders because were sculptors
But if we werent sculptors, we would
Theyd be sending those people in to say, Throw this
away now [laughs]
But thats what we are
You struggle with the materials
and you fight with these materials, and then you kind of
come to a truce
You kind of come to this peace,
and you figure out how youre gonna get along,
how youre going to make something together
But its a new language
And so with any new language,
you have to be very articulate in what you
how you say things, how youre going to talk
And so with Dantes Daphne,
it was a new it was still very fresh, a new language
I was making the work on the ground
I was using dark colors
I was coating the the flowers with very thin layers
of color, and we were putting them together in new ways
So Daphne is a minor figure from Greek mythology
And she was considered, actually, a nymph
But she was such a beauty, and Apollo fell in love
with her
And so he really chased her and just was just about
ready to catch her
And she was freaked out
And so she was running and just screaming to her father,
who was the the god of the river
And so her father turned her into a laurel tree
Dantes Daphne has a bit of pissiness,
And its a little bit closer to Miss Havisham,
whos always been a favorite of mine
You remember her from "Great Expectations," of course
She was told that maybe fifteen minutes before
she was to get married, that her husband had left town,
that she was jilted
And the tables were all set, the wedding cake
was left there
She left her wedding dress on, and she never changed it
again for the rest of her life
and she could care less
And she was very wealthy
People came to pay tribute to her,
but only to get her money
And shed just smell horribly
and she has this awful wedding dress
And theres rats eating her cake, theres rats going
across the rafters
She was horrible
And I love Miss Havisham
She was pissy and mean
And I always think of Miss Havisham
She plays in my mind
Im always combining other famous women characters
with other women characters
And they live in many of my sculptures
Dantes Daphne took a very long time to actually put
the whole thing together
I wanna say two years
Sometimes it gets so buried in there
Ill forget at the end,
because its built over such a long period of time, all
the things
What goes out the door has to be good
But theres been a lot of bad made in here
And some days I try to make really bad,
because sometimes when you make really bad, its really
good
So thats what we do here