Artist:
This is two panels of a much larger piece in progress. It is made from hundreds of dolls that have been meticulously organized and glued to emulate the bone ossuaries found in various areas of Europe. A large portion of those ossuaries were made from victims of the Black Death, so I find it fitting that I have been working on this piece this year. I have been collecting the dolls for over two years. It is commentary on many of my obsessions, interests, and viewpoints regarding death, religious practices, medieval art, consumerism, mass production, and childhood trauma.
Destiny Augustine is an Austin-based do-it-all-artist and fabricator with a very diverse skill set and passion for creative ideation and planning, process creation, testing, constant skill building, and above all, competency. She loves learning new materials and finding unexpected uses for them. She has spent her entire life building a skill set that utilizes incredibly steady hands, spatial awareness, and hand eye coordination in combination with a love and appreciation of many aesthetics. That combined with her tiny stature means she excels at doing finicky things in small spaces. Her current creative goal is creating a set of ongoing narratives and themes that run through a series of installations, using unifying materials, color palettes, recurring shapes, and ideas in order to create a recognizable “brand.” She works with a very broad range of materials, and from an incredibly diverse set of inspirations including many scientific interests, weird natural phenomenon and critters, fantasy and sci-fi, and the quirks of the many human beings she is lucky enough to know. Her current work includes fabricating large commercial pieces, playing with large tesla coils, and exploring the social and environmental impact of dolls–and all the things she can say by gluing them together.